Trek For Chop Daily Journal

 We set out from the Atlantic Ocean on June 14th aiming for the Pacific and on July 28th we made it to Pacific…Missouri. No ocean here, but the Comfort Inn has a nice pool!  Yes, it’s just one of the amusing twists and turns of our journey. Let’s see…we’ve had breakfast in West Berlin (Pennsylvania), lunch in Poland (Indiana) and an early dinner in London (Ohio). It was over 90 degrees in Alaska (Indiana) when we passed through, and our biggest regret so far is that we were within ten miles of Funkhouser (Illinois) and didn’t swing by. Funkhouser just SOUNDS cool, doesn’t it?  One place we DIDN’T miss, though, was Casey, Illinois. Pronounced “K-Z”, this fascinating little town was one of the highlights of the whole trip, primarily because we arrived there during Jenny’s visit so she could share in the fun. About 15 years ago, like so many small towns, downtown Casey was struggling. Lots of people were ready to give up, but not local businessman Jim Bolin. He came up with ...

 Feels like a good time to remind ourselves why we’re on this crazy trip!! 22 years ago, our family got thrown for a loop when we learned early in Jill’s pregnancy that Tommy had spina bifida. The doctors at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia said we could participate in a clinical trial of fetal surgery, and Jill bravely agreed. She and Tommy had surgery on March 2, 2001, then Jill recovered at the Ronald McDonald House in Camden. So many people pitched in…the volunteers and staff in Camden, our families, especially Jill’s sister Gina and Matt’s sister Beth and husband Rich, our neighbors, our Immaculate Conception church community, the Methacton community where Matt works…and, of course, the wonderful doctors, nurses, social workers, therapists and support staff at CHOP.  All Fetal Surgery families know the tornado of emotions prior to, during and after surgery.  To be in a CHOP Fetal Surgery family means being comforted and lifted up by intelligent, honest and sympath...

 I was eating the complimentary breakfast at the Super 8 in Greenfield, Indiana the other day and this guy about my age got up from his table and said to the woman cleaning the counter, “Thank you, ma’am, for the good breakfast.” She looked up, maybe a little surprised that someone’d acknowledged her. “We try…we don’t always succeed, but we always try.”  “If somebody didn’t like it,” he shrugged, “it’s cause they’re too damn picky.” I laughed and nodded at the guy, who shrugged again.  “Well, it’s true.”   It IS true…but what really made me smile was the simple message of his kindness: looking at the bright side is a CHOICE.  Some of the pictures we’ve posted in earlier entries of this blog were a combination of luck and skill: we were just lucky to pass by the hawk and heron, and lucky that they stayed around long enough for Tommy to skillfully capture them. Some were ALL skill: we didn’t need much luck to find ducks — we see them quite a bit — but Tommy’s...

 We’ve been on the road for nearly a month, two guys who don’t really ride bikes, so all this pedaling on the straight, flat roads of Ohio and Indiana gives us plenty of time for deep thoughts. Forgive us if this one gets a little philosophical, but the brain goes to interesting places when you sit on a bike seat for hours each day. Plus we’re getting a lot of Canadian wildfire smoke out here now…maybe it’s going to our heads!  One day as we slid alongside yet another cornfield, Tommy made this observation: “All these people we meet or pass by, they all have their own lives…they’ve never even heard of us and then there we are. We talk to a few of them…and then we’re gone.” And all of the people we chat with tell us the same thing as we leave: “Be safe!” A few days earlier, we had been dodging thunderstorms in downtown Dayton. The cloudbursts were swirling in at about twenty minute intervals and we were moving along the city bike paths next to the river, hiding under different ...

 Where are you from?” and “Where are you going?” are the top two questions people ask us, and neither is easy to answer. No one seems to know where Glenside, PA is, so we sometimes just say “Philadelphia” or “New Jersey”. One time a guy asked “Where are you from?” and we said, “The Atlantic Ocean”.   What does THAT mean?” he asked, totally confused, imagining, I guess,  the two of us emerging out of the waves like mermen, pedaling up onto the beach, our bikes covered in seaweed.  The answer to “Where are you going?” is tricky, too, because there’s more than one thing we can say. Usually we’re so wrapped up in the moment that the first thing we say is, “Well, TONIGHT we’re just trying to get to…”, but of course that’s not what people mean. We used to say “California!” or “The Pacific Ocean!”, but we realized after the first week that at the pace we were going we’d get to the Pacific Ocean sometime in October…but we have to stop mid-August. So now we say, “We’re t...

“Are you guys killers?” the guy asked, though I suppose if we really WERE killers, we probably wouldn’t tell him, would we? Actually, we just needed to use a bathroom and there he was working in his yard and so…we asked.  Something about being on this bike trip has made us lower our defenses and just ask complete strangers for help if we need help. Maybe it’s because so many complete strangers have been so kind and offered help BEFORE we’ve even asked…the woman pumping gas in Wellsburg, West Virginia who told us how to get around a trail closure, Tim McConnell further down the trail in Wheeling who advised us how to get over the closed suspension bridge, Dave at Quick Service Bike Shop in Aetnaville, Ohio, who literally dropped what he was doing and fixed my derailleur, Robin at The Fat Apple Bakery in Bridgeport, Ohio, who started crying and gave us a donation when Tommy told her his story. And SO many people everywhere who slow down and ask us if we’re ok as we slowly push our bi...

If we had done the slightest bit of research (we didn’t), we would’ve learned that maybe passing through Ohiopyle, PA on the Great Allegheny Passage on the 4th of July weekend wasn’t the smartest move…apparently a huge family tourist spot on a normal summer weekend, Ohiopyle was JAM-PACKED as we wobbled our bikes  through at the end of 40 miles. We didn’t plow into anyone but there were some near misses, that’s for sure! And we won’t go into detail about how bad we are at camping…let’s just say we got the tent up and somehow got it back in the bag. Everything else was a comedy of errors of rain, dirt and beef jerky.  But while we sometimes end up in the wrong place at the wrong time, we’ve also encountered so MANY MORE stunning examples of being lucky enough to be in the RIGHT place at the PERFECT moment. Take this hawk, for instance. It was an early rainy morning, no one else on that part of the trail but us. We came around a bend…and there he was, perched as if awaiting our ...