We had a good night at the Ramada and went down to sample the provided breakfast. We had cereal, coffee and juice and shared the breakfast room with about six working types, mostly speaking Spanish. The oranges and apples did not look that good so we took a bagel and cream cheese and headed down the route I had put together from the Internet to get us safely back to our route on our Adventure Cycling Association (ACA) maps. It was generally a pretty good route, much safer than the route to our motel last night on route 140 towards Baltimore. We were mostly counter commute but still had to deal with school buses, which as a rule tend to give us less room than about any other type of vehicle. As we got farther from Baltimore, the hills increased and traffic thinned. We stopped at one point at a fork in the road and a local resident was just walking his daughter out to the curb to wait for her school bus. The bus came and went and we chatted with the dad who works between Baltimore and DC. He is former US Navy submariner as was my older brother Tom who was on a fairly famous sub, the USS Halibut back in the 1960s. We followed his suggested route off my selected route for about a half mile and missed a couple of short steep hills and a section of road with sharp turns and short sight lines. The former sub mariner noted the former owner of his house had had a car through his fence and into his yard more than once. Once away from Baltimore and back on our rural roads, we faced the same problem from previous days of where to get something to eat. Again the restaurants do not open until late morning. We stopped in Gleneig and on a suggestion from a local lady, went to the only place serving any breakfast in the area, Subway. The Subway was operated by a nice bright interesting young man from Nepal who had been in the States 4 years. He pitched Nepal as a great place to hike and ride.
We have enjoyed good weather the last week and a front is coming in tomorrow and by late morning we could feel the change in the air. More leaves were falling along our route and it cooled as we rode. We came to highway 108 north of Olney where our maps indicated there was a restaurant. As we waited for the traffic to clear we observed the front door being unlocked and the "OPEN" sign turned on. Opening time was 11:30 am. We had a nice lunch of pulled pork sandwiches and chatted for sometime with a couple in the parking lot as we were leaving. A few miles later we picked up the Rock Creek Trail which would take us all the way into Bethesda, the planned end to this leg of our journey down the East coast. Our ACA maps suggested we should get local maps of the Rock Creek Trail as it is poorly signed. We did not and figured we could follow the creek down stream. Planned worked reasonably well once we got on the trail. We crossed a major highway not on our maps and found a new trail along the road. Seeking directions to the start of the Rock Creek trail, we stopped one lady on the bike path and, has been the case 9 times out of 10, she had no idea. But she had an excuse as she was from Arizona in town visiting her sister. Down the path a bit and found a sign directing us to the Rock Creek Trail. It was a delightful ride and again evidence of the recent heavy rains was obvious. Down trees, creek bed full of brush, gravel washed over the trail etc. We saw some deer along the trail and as the trail is heavily used, they paid no attention to us at all. We also saw two black squirrels. Most of our squirrels have been grey, some brown and these were our first and only black ones.
We enjoyed our ride on the trail but were not sure where the best place to get off, so as we got close, we got off and approached a police officer in a car. He gave us directions and we rode through some traffic right to Martin and Meg's house where we used the hidden key to enter the house, unpack our bags, take a shower, drink their beer and generally kick back until Martin home from work. We are leaving our bikes and some of our gear at their very nice house until we return in the Spring to continue down the coast to Florida.
Martin arrived and we went to local club for dinner and where we are staying the night. We were joined for dinner by my wife's Aunt Jannie, cousins Mark and Martin and Meg, the delightful spouse of Martin. We enjoyed great company, good food, and ended the day feeling very good.
57 miles for the day and a feeling of accomplishment and that it was a good time and place to stop to let our bodies recover. Rudy's odometer shows we have ridden 1,007 miles since Bar Harbor.
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