Day 66, March 31, Chesapeake and Ohio Towpath bike adventure

 Three amazing things:  1- Dan, our Bed N Breakfast host; now he was amazing. Well spoken, highly educated, slender and healthy at 64, nicely dressed, handsome and generous and humorous and engaging he was. He cooked us breakfast wearing a chef’s frock and was just a lovely man with easy conversation and a ready smile. Quite the host, right? Until…the man’s house was completely despicable! It’s an old house which should have been condemned 50 years ago and was as filthy as almost any home I’ve ever been in. Dirty, messy, smelly, and I don’t think he’s cleaned the floors in the 14 years he’s lived there. His car was even worse, reeking of old wet dog.  I was afraid to touch anything. Aaron took one look in the bathroom with its filthy rug and grimy tub and refused to shower. I had a difficult time laying down on the bed with its saggy mattress and thread bare sheets. Had I not been so exhausted and completely without options in the itsy bitsy backwoods village we were in, I’d have kept on pedaling. But Dan was pleasant and thoughtful and talked our ears off, then gave us a lift in his nasty car back to the trail and threw in lots of great advice for todays ride.  He grinned genuinely when I called him our bike trail angel.  2- The weather forecast looked quite abysmal for today…rain all day long was forecasted. The morning began with a drizzle, but the wind came from the south as we rode eastward, so although it was a very brisk wind, still it blew sidewards at us instead of head on, making for not so difficult a ride. Dan had called it; a warm wet system coming up from the gulf. We anticipated heavy showers all day, but they never materialized until we were eating dinner in the town we’re to spend the night in. When the deluge finally came, we waited it out in the restaurant biding our time with another piece of double chocolate cake.  3- The last 4 miles of our ride, after having avoided the soggy weather all day, was sadly a wet one. Has been a long day, pedaling from 9am to 6pm, and those last 4 miles uphill from the Potomac to our AirBnB in the rain almost did is in. But a warm room and a hot shower and a couple of games of pool have reinvigorated our spirits, and we will sleep deeply and dream of electric bikes.

Good deeds: Today we lunched on a sloppy juicy burger, and it was just too easy to pay for the guy at the drive up window who had no idea who sprung for his meal. Then as I was walking to my table, a cute elderly guy asked me what the “opposite of nadir” means, but his southern drawl sounded to my ears as “possum of Nair.” He was stuck on his crossword, but putting our heads together, we got him through it. He said “zenith” and “honk” in southern dialect which I didn’t interpret correctly, and he laughed at my bafflement. Such an adorable old coot! 

We logged 46 miles today. There’ll be another 44 tomorrow.