Shortly after having my knees replaced last year, a friend brought me a book titled 100 Bike Rides of a Lifetime. It was a good distraction for me during the discomfort of recovery. We had already done a few of the rides. It was fun to look at the pictures and feel a connection with other riders.

On page 18, we read about the Great Allegheny Passage (The GAP), a trail running from the heart of Pittsburgh through the backwoods of the Allegheny Mountains to Cumberland, Maryland. There, the trail ends and the Chesapeake and Ohio (C&O) Canal towpath begins. The C&O ends in downtown Washington DC. Combined, the trails are just under 350 miles. The GAP is a Rails-to-Trails path, which means it is mostly crushed gravel. The C&O is a dirt path that parallels a canal that was built around 1850. The Canal was an impressive engineering feat, enabling someone to float a barge from sea level in DC to Cumberland, gaining 610 feet of elevation by passing through the various locks and dams.

We had heard of these two trails previously from other riders. We decided this would be our 2026 return to biking tour. We decided to ride it out and back. There are so many logistics involved in getting our bike to the starting point that we decided an out-and-back would double our ride time and let us spend more time in nature.

Having selected the route, I got to work on the logistics. Even though this ride starts and stops in big cities and is on the East Coast of the US, it seems to be one of the more remote rides we’ve done. Except for trail closures, we will not ride on roads. We are at the point of our riding hobby where we no longer want to compete with cars.

To plan the route, AI wrote bicycle routing software for us. The systems I have used in the past had a few limitations. First, I wanted them to lock onto a trail system and stay on it. Often, routing software tries to find the most direct path, which may involve segments on roads with traffic. Our custom routing system locked us onto named trails and kept us there as much as possible. I also wanted to include in the routing metrics our desire to avoid steep hills (due to our tandem) and cars. All that information combines as the software chooses an optimal route. I also needed a system that allowed me to identify trail closures and route around them. This is far more complex than just moving a single point - one has to remove the closed sections from the underlying mapping data (or make them impossibly expensive to traverse).

The custom routing software also helps us plan multi-day trips. This involves identifying roughly where we should stop each night and then providing a reasonable search grid for hotels and campsites. Over a few months, I identified potential accommodations (we’ll decide which we will use as we ride), places to buy food, and places to pump/filter water or buy it.

The main obstacle (that we know of) will be weather. The C&O is a dirt trail, and mud is difficult on our bike. It is difficult on any bike, but a recumbent tandem with about 100 pounds of gear strapped to it makes for a unique challenge. Our route doesn’t have many options to leave the trail and ride on a road, so we are quite committed to the established plan.

I took the bike apart on Tuesday night. The process involves cleaning the garage and putting all my tools away. Then, using only the tools on my bike, I take it apart. I have to be extra careful to use only the tools on my bike, because those are the ones I’ll have available when I try to put it together in Pittsburgh. (I bring quite a few tools with me, enough to do almost any repair that would cost $250 or less at a bike shop.) I also have to be very careful at the end of the process to ensure that every part that ended up on the garage floor is reattached somewhere or carefully packed in a bag that’s going with us to Pittsburgh. The tear-down is more extensive than with a normal bike — the shape of our tandem means almost everything has to be removed from the frame for it to fit in a box. It is quite a process, but strangely satisfying. (Check back tomorrow to see if I still feel that way after putting it back together.)

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The process of packing two weeks of living into four small panniers is also a bit of an adventure. Gratefully, we can also strap gear to our bike, so it is a bit of an exaggeration to say that everything has to be in the panniers. I took a picture of the stuff that gets strapped to the bike outside the panniers, which you can see below.

And so our next puzzle begins. Bryan drove us to the airport; we navigated the check-in process (a bit harder with bike boxes), and now we’re sitting on a chair in the sky, headed for Pittsburgh.