July 3, 2023
Day 10: New Castle, PA to Ravenna, OH
In which I am supposed to get wet, but don't
Yesterday dawned with a 90% chance of rain, threatening to rival Day 9. Fortunately, the rain never materialized. I was grateful.
I learned a bit more about New Castle's history from Wikipedia last night. It used to have quite a bit going on: tin ceiling tiles, paper mills, steel mills, porclain. In it's heyday, the population was near 60 thousand. After a steady decline, it is now in the low 20s. These days it's known for fireworks more than anything. There are a couple of fireworks companies that do high-end stuff like presidential inaugurations. Who knew?
After a really good breakfast, I left New Castle, and that meant a fairly long climb out of town. I'm still in the foothills of Appalachia, and not quite to the flatlands yet.
I'm reading that the air quality is nearly back to normal, and the smoke has moved on. From this picture, I really can't tell. Is that just low cloud cover, or is some smoke still here?
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A few miles in, I got a nice surprise: A bike trail! It was a nice one, too! I stayed on this for 7 miles - a nice break from cars.
A few miles later, I crossed into Ohio. With Maryland, DC, & Pennsylvania, that makes four so far for this trip. Yes, I'm counting DC as a state - it should be one.
In Youngstown, I got a nice surprise. An open bike shop! If you don't frequent bicycle shops much, you may not know most are closed Mondays (as they get most of their business on Saturdays). It's just been that way for years. This one was in a former church, which made for a really cool space.
I went there, thinking that if they didn't carry Cane Creek products or knew how to fix them, that I could just buy a regular seat-post and take the other one home for repair.
To my surprise, the 18yo kid working there took the female pin that I still had and managed to find a screw that would work on the other side, making the suspension part work just fine again. And then he wouldn't take any money, claiming the couple of stories I had told him while he worked was plenty. I'm extremely grateful and will be leaving that shop a REALLY nice Google review.
The rest of the day was just rolling farmland and a persistent headwind that pretty much sucked the life out of my legs as the afternoon wore on. I didn't see much worth taking pictures of (except maybe wildflowers) but the headwind and increasing threat of rain as I got to my destination kept me moving. I'll try to do better tomorrow.
I got to my stay around 4:15. at 4:30 it began to pour, so I think I timed that perfectly!
Tomorrow has me going 68 miles to Oberlin, OH. It's supposed to be sunny and warm, so I'll need to slather the sunscreen on again.
Today's ride: 59 miles (95 km)
Total: 494 miles (795 km)
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