In June of 1998, I decided to bike somewhere new - to visit our friends Gena and Chuck in southern Maryland. By this point Scott and I realized that we were going to spend the money to stay in motels instead of camping, so we no longer had the tent or the sleeping bags with us. We started off on the wrong foot, deciding to bike from my house (in Cheltenham) into Philadelphia to catch a peak-hour train from there to Wilmington, Delaware. We could have waited a few hours and caught a train from right down the street instead, but we were eager to hit the road. We made excellent time to Philly, probably using more energy than we should have. Our day stopped outside of Aberdeen, Maryland; again, the trip was turning out to be more hilly than I wanted, and we biked cautiously to make sure that my knee would really be okay. We lost quite a bit of time getting into and out of Baltimore, and stopped for the day just outside of the city. The fabulous people at the Comfort Inn (pictured here) were out of rooms (as they were in Baltimore itself), but apparently Scott looked so desparate that they opened up a room that they use for conferences, folded out a couch for a second bed, and put us there.
Our third day made up for all of the delay - we covered about 96 miles, making it all the way to Lexington Park, Maryland. We biked back to Baltimore, and caught an Amtrak train back to Philly. Total distance: 300 miles, a new record for me.
For those that are interested, I've extracted the waypoints from my GPS and plotted them using tiger.census.gov. Here is the resulting map.
