Nothing fancy, just a short bike tour from Pittsburgh to DC, via seven different trail systems and a few different roads and streets...
About Our Trip
It sounds simple enough...
Right up until we started planning for it.
Before I get into that, I should go back to the start...
Of leaves and trails
Years ago, I lived in the Washington, DC area for about a year. While living there, I had bike commuted to work many times on the W&OD Trail, a very nice, if often crowded, converted rail trail.
Terry was intrigued about riding the rail trails back East, and wanted to see the fall colors back there sometime as well, so we decided to combine the two desires and ride the trails during leaf season.
In researching our options, I found a couple of very helpful websites, for Bike Washington and the Allegheny Trail Alliance, on which were described two major trail systems: The first, down the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal Towpath, a canal towpath converted into a bike/hike trail (from Washington to Cumberland, MD), and the second, down the series of converted rail-trails dubbed The Great Allegheny Passage (from Pittsburgh to Cumberland).
Amazingly, this combines (with a few well-placed and fairly short road detours to fill in gaps) to provide a near-seamless series of off-road trails all the way from northwest of Pittsburgh, near the Pittsburgh airport, to the Mall in DC. As this graphic from the Allegheny Trail Alliance website depicts it, it looks like this when you put it all together:
