June 9, 2019
A Christmas Gift: Inn to Inn Biking in Northeast PA
Will the weather gods sneer or smile?
For Christmas last year, my wife Carole bought me (well, us) a 4 day biking trip with Pocono Biking out of Jim Thorpe, PA. The trip would be about 135 miles, mostly on the Delaware and Lehigh Trail along the Delaware and Lehigh Rivers, with the last 14 miles on the NJ side of the Delaware on the Delaware and Raritan Trail. Due to various areas of construction or spots where the D&L trail isn't complete yet, there was maybe 10 miles or so of road riding and a few miles of "primitive trail" riding - essentially biking on sections where the rails and most of the ballast (large gravel) had been removed, but no trail construction had been started.
To keep this journal from sounding like a commercial, I won't mention them again but Pocono Biking selected the route, the hotels at the stops, many of the meals and provided a van/trailer shuttle from the end back to where we started. One Pocono Biking person rode with us, one drove the van each day. They were great - I highly recommend Pocono Biking for anyone considering a similar trip.
Since the trip would be 90% on rail trails, we loaded up our son's old mountain bike for Carole and my old Schwinn beater bike for me on the car and made the 180 mile drive from where we live in Maryland up to the Inn at Jim Thorpe PA on Sunday night.
The town of Jim Thorpe was called Mauch Chunk until 1954, when through a complicated series of events, the body of recently deceased world renowned athlete Jim Thorpe (who never lived there) was moved there and the town changed its name. We had a great dinner at Moya, strolled the small but scenic town and went back to the hotel to check the weather forecast, which didn't look good...
| Rate this entry's writing | Heart | 5 |
| Comment on this entry | Comment | 0 |