Hancock Md The end of the ride

We made it to Hancock which is about 120 miles from the end of the trail and I decided to call it a trip for a couple of reasons. One was a break in the bike seat bracket (see below), another was that I was just mentally tired of riding the bike. The scenery and the people were great and interesting, just like it has been for the entire trip but I got kinda wore out with it all. Part of it may have been riding the GAP path which is so much different than riding on the public highway. The path was good but I missed the open road after a while.
Another aspect was that I am not the best biker to have a sag wagon driver to interact with. I like to be self contained and able to move at my own pace. Ned is a hell of a guy and I tested his patience a lot. The last reason was that I was not and am not in the same place mentally or physically as I was before crash. I may have pushed to finish ride in 2009 a little too much.

The trip started in late May with the van ride to Oregon with Miss Sassy with the plan to finish before Labor Day. Due to recovery time from after crash it ended on Oct 14th. That is long enough , at least for me it was. I now have some appreciation for how Forst Gump felt when he finally quit running across the country.

After the crash I wanted to get back on the bike and get the rest of the way to D.C. but it all was not the same as B.C. (before crash).
My bike computer says I rode over 7000 miles in 2009--probably 3200 were training miles the rest was trip related .

Several fellow bikers has teased me about not keeping exact milage , daily, weekly or for entire trip. To me that is not a big deal. I actually get bored reading blogs about bike trips that spend too much time on how far, how fast .

I have yet to go back and read what I have written about trip or look at many of the pics, but will do so at some point in time and I am very curious how I will feel about the whole deal. As I write this I feel like it was someone else who put the miles on and not me. In the back of my mind I am thinking of a future ride to Memphis-to New Orleans to Key West. I will see how I feel in the Spring.

My time is filled with several business projects , rehabbing the family farm and not the least getting Russ married(which was the best).

I will continue to blog about happening around me but there will probably be more non bike stuff than bike stuff.

Many thanks to all the blog readers who interacted with me during the trip. It was very encouraging and also surprising how many people were interested in what I was doing and seeing. Very surprising.

While in Hancock we met and had a great conversation with Mr. Hepburn the owner of this fruit market. Very interesting and we could have stayed a lot longer. He turned us on to Honey Crisp apples --very tasty.

We loaded everything in van and headed to see Gettysburg battlefield. That was another wonderful experience and another place on my return visit list. From Gettysburg we drove to Doylestown to visit brother Mike and family. It is always a treat to see the Baltes trophy family.

This was the last of the C.&O. trail I road. It was beautiful.

Not far from Hancock I hit a big bump and broke this bracket under the seat. It was still fairly ridable and I considered wiring it together to finish but decided not to. It appeared that there had been a crack working for awhile before it broke completely--probably crack was result of crash but with my big butt working that seat for 7000miles about any chunk of metal would suffer from fatigue. There is only so much you can expect something like this to take.