Lancaster, Part 1

I needed a quick solo getaway for a weekend to clear my head, and chose Lancaster because it was close and had what looked like a very nice selection of medium length (20-35 mile) bike rides with tip sheets (important if you're out in the middle of nowhere and don't know where you're going, both of which described me- here's what a tip sheet looks like).

I stupidly showed up without a hotel reservation. Who would have thought there's be so many people in a tourist area on a August weekend? D'oh. So the first place I stopped had no rooms, but they did have free wifi in the lobby so I made a reservation at the Courtyard by Marriott. I'll write a hotel review later, but my first order of business was to go riding, so while housekeeping was getting the rooms ready, I took off for my first ride, what's called the Ephrata Cloister Ride.

I started at some kind of farm museum and headed north (I think). I rode through some corn and then by some office parks and when I came back out into the corn, I saw a biplane doing loops and stalls and all kinds of crazy stuff. As I rode along, I saw it was an air show at the local airport. Very distracting but very cool.

The ride is described as being rolling hills, which I guess is a reasonable description. The country is really pretty and as someone whose main experience is suburban riding, them main thing that strikes me is the scarcity of other cars or people. Once I left the air show area, where there were people all over the sides of the roads, I saw almost nobody for the next hour. I saw a pretty unimpressive 13th century castle that had been disassembled in England and transported here. I guess the really good castles weren't available.

I began to realize as I went along that the route was structure in a way to use up every bit of back road in  an area, taking the most indirect way possible to get from one place to the next. I noticed this when I came back by the air show for the second time (jets in formation doing all kinds of outrageous tricks) a half hour after my first go-by. This is fine when the purpose is to meander, and so I spent the day reveling endless cornfields and the varying smells of animal dung, while avoiding what dung is on the road.

The other thing I learned on this ride is that I can whip any of those horsedrawn carts in a head-to-head, though they do pretty good going uphill and it's a bit discouraging to hear them stay close after I've blown by them. Clip-clop clip-clop.

Lunch in the almost unbearably cute town of Lititz and dinner at a dive sports bar in downtown Lancaster after I saw that there is nothing, and I really mean nothing, going on in this town on a Saturday night. I thought about going bowling after watching the game, but decided to sleep instead. I'll do day 2 in a separate entry.