As we drive through Eastern Pennsylvania toward Pittsburgh, I wonder how we should refer to our journey. Will it be:
Erik and Ted’s Excellent Adventure
Brokeback Mountain Bike
Rocky Road Horror Picture Show
Deliverance (from breakdowns and bad weather)
Geezers on Wheels
I’m inclined to go with the first reference as with the classic slacker movie, “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure,” we too are taking an unusual means of transport to travel through time. Rather than a time machine disguised as a telephone booth, we are using a pair of old Cannondale bikes and an even older quartet of legs.
For me it is personal as we start at the confluence of three rivers (Ohio, Allegheny, and Monongahela) less than a mile from where I was born and where my family still lives. Tomorrow we will bike past shells of old steel mills and factories where my grandfather, father and other family members worked starting over 100 years ago. But the buildings aren’t producing steel goods any more.
This change has given Ted and me the opportunity to explore the history of this space over a week as we wheel over old railroad beds, bridges and canal towpaths. Instead of mules moving goods, we are moving ourselves and baggage of quick-dry clothing and Clif bars.
It will be sobering to see the marvel of engineering cleverness and the sadness of near slave labor that created the Paw Paw Tunnel and linking passages that will lead us through some of the most important and profound battles of the Civil War.
But we will also get to visit Fallingwater, one of Frank Loyd Wright’s architectural masterpieces, and the Hot Metal Bridge that took hot steel from blast furnaces, to open hearths, and then steel ingots back to rolling mills. We will bike over the Eastern Continental Divide and cross the Mason-Dixon Line. Eventually we will reach Washington D.C. where we plan to bike down the mall triumphantly before we get into our renal car at Union Station to drive home.
It will be an excellent adventure.
