The Hightail: Last stop before the East Coast Tour begins

2 Jul 2014

Trey and I were on a mission. We’d had enough of the bad weather and wanted to get to the eastern states as quickly as possible. So, we pushed though Ohio, Pennsylvania, and stopped in Schenectady - New York. We have great, mountain bike-loving friends, who live there and had a large spot in their driveway for us to park our giant truck camper for a few days. Luca and Jenny have an 8-month old son, so they take turns riding while the other parent hangs with the baby…until the baby is old enough to get on a bike of course. We stayed with Luca and Jenny for long enough to ride, get sick and eat pizza.

It took us two weeks to get to the northeast. We did get to ride some, but not as much as we had hoped for. Unforeseen weather patterns kept us on our toes and moving eastward at rapid fire pace. So, when Luca wanted to take us to one of his favorite areas to ride called Daniels Road State Forest – SMBA. We jumped at the idea. Before we left, I should have asked questions like, “will my ass be kicked, and will we need to pull over on the ride home, so I can vomit in the front lawn of one of the mansions in Luca’s neighborhood?” (Small stuff like that!) Anyways, the trails were awesome, and loaded with technical, rocky, root-infested ups and downs. However, I was not prepared for the swamp heat and became over-heated very quickly. Not wanting to be whiny, I pushed forth and crossed the limit of my mental and physical threshold. My excuse for how poorly I felt on the drive back to Luca’s is all the sitting in our truck for 2-weeks while traveling across the country. I didn’t actually throw up on the mansion’s manicured front lawn, but we definitely parked out front while I talked myself out of the two-way purge.

After a few days of R&R and one more ride with Jenny at the local city park, we were off to Vermont to start the East Coast Road Trip (#ECRT).

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