For several years now, David Waldburger of our club has been singing the virtues of Bike Virginia, a five-day cycling tour that takes advantage of the thousands of miles of manicured pavement that criss-cross Virginia from the densely populated areas along the Chesapeake Bay in the east to the more rural areas around the Shenendoah and Allegheny Mountains in the west. We had spurned Dave’s offer for several years, opting in the last three years for the wacky RAGRBRAI ride in Iowa, the mountainous and much less wacky Bicycle Tour of Colorado, and a self-guided circle route through the Adirondacks of New York. This year, Bike Virginia got the nod, and 13 of us traveled to Berryville, VA on a Friday night to join Dave and his extended family at the event.
This year was Bike Virginia’s 25th anniversary, and about 2000 people participated. Unlike the Colorado tour, most of the cyclists at Bike Virginia lived within an 8-hour drive and avoided the airline hassle. The mid-Atlantic states were obviously well represented, but we also ran into a fair number of New Englanders along the way. The majority of our crew selected the camping option, while four chose the more hospitable hotel option. The Thread City Cyclers wore their colors proudly, and with 13 of us attending we were a noticeable presence. TCC’ers included yours truly and my better half Beth, the aforementioned Dave Waldburger, Eric Anderson, Tammy Waleszczyk, Caitlin Roston, Judy & Steve Borrman, Alan Chasse, Bill Penn, Fran Storch, Phil Forzley, and the indomitable tandem team of Lisa Celona and Joe Moreno.
Beth had announced earlier this year her intention to complete a 100-mile ride in every State before she “checks out” and this year’s route, which passed through Virginia, West Virginia, and Maryland gave her the opportunity to put a few more century notches in her lycra belt. Each day there were several mileage options, typically ranging from 30 miles to as much as 100 miles. The first two nights we were based on Berryville, VA near the VA/WV border. The tour then shuttled our belongings via trailer truck to Shepardsville, WV where we spent the next three nights before returning to the point of origin.
The organizers did a fantastic job with the routes, sticking mainly to narrow back roads and little used county roads that rolled through a seemingly endless supply of horse farms. Rest stops were spaced at intervals of approximately 15 miles and were well stocked with standard biker-friendly goodies. On occasion, however, we would pull into a church parking lot, where the ladies auxiliary had pulled out the stops with home-made cookies, brownies, soup, and in one glorious case, extra greasy home-made donuts dipped in sugar. Mr. Penn ate four, and a week later his stomach is still trying to digest them. The tour provided us extensive lunch fare either out on the route or back at the start/finish point. In most cases, those who set weight loss as a goal for the week failed miserably.
This part of the world, only a few miles south of the Mason-Dixon Line, was at the front lines of the Civil War, and recollections of the conflict were all around us. Day three, which was titled the “Civil War Honor Loop”, traversed the Antietam Battlefield near Sharpsburg, Maryland, where the combined death toll in a single 12-hour period in 1862 was 23,000. The rolling fields and picket fences were beautiful, but the signs identifying “The Bloody Corn Field” and “Bloody Lane” provided grim reminders of the site’s history and left us all feeling a bit somber. Harper’s Ferry, WV provided another interesting history lesson – the Town’s isolation at the mountainous intersection of the Shenendoah and Potomac Rivers made this an appealing location for the Union to manufacture and store a large percentage of the munitions that it used in the Civil War. The C&O canal passes along the Potomac through Harper’s Ferry, and riders had an option of riding into town via the gravel towpath along the canal for about 15 miles. Those that selected this option were treated to shady conditions with the Potomac River on one side and the canal and its collection of stone locks on the other.
An advantage of riding these major tours is that there are options - you can ride alone or in a group, fast or slow, chatty or non-chatty. Each day is different and you tailor your pace to whatever you’d like that day to be. Sometimes we would ride with each other, sometimes not, and our groupings were different every day. Commonly, others we encountered out on the road would find their pace similar to ours and they would join our merry band for an hour or a day. Angel from Arlington, VA joined our pace line on several occasions. She was training for her first triathlon but had not ridden much in groups and she appreciated our advice on how to work a pace line and how to maintain momentum over short rises. Keith, a local who possessed both greater experience and girth than Angel, joined us on occasion and amused us with his rendition of “Amber waves of grain” as we rolled through the wheat fields. Bill and I responded with our best attempt at John Denver’s Take me Home Country Road - “Blue Ridge Mountains, Shenendoah River”. At other times, the more testosterone-charged members of our band could not help themselves and charged forward as the Colnagos and Pinarellos whooshed by on their carbon wheels. The event is not supposed to be a race, but there is nothing more satisfying than catching a cocky rider on a $10,000 bike, making them suffer, and leaving them in your wake to ponder what went wrong in their quest for fitness.
As was the case at both the Colorado and RAGBRAI tours, the bike manufacturers were at the event in force with their demo tents. Phil, Tammy, and I all took advantage of their offer to borrow top-end Specialized and Trek Madone models for a full day. The demos give you a nice chance for a real test ride, not just a spin around the parking lot.
As the ride wound down on the final day, most of the crew headed home, but six of us extended the trip by driving 45 minutes south to Front Royale, which sits at the north end of Skyline Drive, one of the most scenic and spectacular rides in the U.S. This road, which is entirely within Shenendoah National Park, climbs to the top of the Shenendoah Mountains and then follows the ridge southward at elevations of 2500 to 3800 feet for 102 miles. We drove up to the top of the ridge, passing a couple of road-side black bears, and camped at Big Meadow on the ridge-top at an elevation of 3600 feet. Along the way we drove through the smoke of several forest fires, and in the morning decided to do an out-and-back route going south to avoid the smoke-filled air to the north. Eric A. and I rode ahead of the group and made it 30 miles to the south before turning around. The scenery was spectacular, with tremendous views to the east and west from the top of the ridge. On the way back to our starting point Eric and I spotted a juvenile black bear several hundred yards up the road. As we got closer I looked into the woods for the young bear, which was long gone. What was not long gone was its mother, who much to our surprise bounded onto the road less than 50 feet in front of us. Bear and riders were equally surprised at this turn of events. Eric and I vowed to return another day to ride the entire Skyline as well as the Blue Ridge Parkway which continues several hundred additional miles to the south into North Carolina.
With the Skyline conquered, Eric and Dave Waldburger got in the car and headed north to officiate at a mountain bike world cup race at Mt. Windham, NY, while Beth, Fran, Bill, and I drove on to southwest New Jersey for Beth to snag her third century ride in a week. We parked ourselves in a hotel for the night, waited out a morning thunderstorm, and set out from Burlington, NJ on a course that had been marked just a month earlier for an organized Century ride. One might not think that New Jersey would be a great place for a century ride, but one might be wrong. We had a delightful ride for several hours through farming country, which Bill pointed out looked like Virginia but flattened out. The ride got a little less delightful as the temperature climbed, and by the 80 mile mark we were out of water with no stores in sight and temperatures in the upper 90s. As we wondered which of us would expire first, we passed a bright green lawn in the midst of the empty pine barrens. What we first believed to be a mirage turned out to be three kids playing in their yard with sprinklers and a water slide. We cast aside our New England inhibitions and begged for water. Their parents came out with a tray of frozen popsicles and a pitcher of water and we were saved. Turns out the owner used to live in New Britain and is in a bike club kinda like ours. We made it to back to the car at the 101 mile mark in somewhat delirious shape, and drove out of town under a temperature sign that read 101 degrees. We dubbed the ride 101 at 101 and look forward to never doing a century in weather like that again.
After a long ride home from New Jersey exactly a week after we had departed, and with over 500 miles on our legs, Beth and I were happy to spend a quiet weekend doing laundry, drying out camping gear, and not even considering going for a bike ride. With Beth’s goal of a century in every state still very much intact, we will likely move on to another venue next year, but for those of you looking for an organized ride in some new surroundings without the necessity of getting on an airplane, Bike Virginia is a good pick.
