Veterans' Day Sport Tour
Every year I do a Veterans' Day sport ride with my Columbus riding buddies. But now that I’ve moved to Michigan it’s a little harder to get up early enough to make it down to Cowtown for the weekend rides. Still, this is a traditional ride, and you know you can’t mess with riding traditions.
I left Ann Arbor a little after nine on Friday morning. It was about 220 miles to Coshocton, Ohio, where the group was meeting up for lunch at 12:30. I probably should have left a little earlier, but it’s hard to get moving quickly while it’s still below freezing. Weather was absolutely perfect but still about 30 degrees. When it’s below 40, I prefer to leave the Aerostich at home and wear the Motophoria Meridian/Radion outfit. I’ve never worn warmer gear. Both the ¾-length jacket and pants have removable thinsulate liners and work exceptionally well with electric gear, and the neck closure is totally effective keeping wind and rain out. The tradeoff is that it's nearly useless above 65 degrees. Along with the Gerbing jacket liner and gloves, though, it kept me toasty warm all day.
As I merged onto US23 south off I-94, I fell in behind an FJR1300 being ridden briskly towards Ohio. He was keeping a nice pace but had poor lane discipline so I didn’t follow too closely. He also didn’t have much gear on considering the near-freezing temperatures, and he was almost pathetically huddled up behind his windshield. Sometimes electric gear makes you feel downright smug. I used him as a rabbit down to the Ohio line, then ditched him south of Toledo.
I stayed on the US30 slab just past Mansfield to Hayesville, at which point I took the direct route to Coshocton over OH179, though Mohicanville to Nashville. The terrain got hillier and the road got progressively curvier as I got into moraine country, where the last glacier dumped some nice hills and valleys. South of here is essentially unglaciated. Southeastern Ohio is sort of a secret among riders. There is probably no greater concentration of fantastic riding roads in the country as there is here and continuing into northwestern West Virginia.
Ohio Route 60 is sort of the gateway to southeastern Ohio, along with the parallel-twenty-miles-east OH 83. Just about any road it crosses provides plenty of thrills. I was really enjoying the new pavement, because last time I was through here it was pretty torn up. Much of it had been underwater last fall during the floods that inundated the Ohio Valley in September and again in January. The town of Killbuck gets repeatedly submerged in these floods. It looks like it dried out okay this time. Most of the businesses were open, with a big crowd at the VFW hall.
After another fifteen miles of great twisties, the road along Killbuck creek abruptly dumps you into the Walhonding valley where, for the first time in a while, you see broad expanses of flat bottomland. The valley widened even wider as I approached Coshocton. The prism and towpath of the Walhonding Canal is still quite visible in places, especially as you approach its junction with the Ohio and Erie Canal at Roscoe, which still has a number of surviving lift locks. Roscoe Village has been overly restored to a nearly-genteel state that gives a poor impression as to what a canal town was really like.
Then I was in Coshocton, the first leg of the day's journey completed. Two hundred and fifty years ago Coshocton was possibly Ohio's largest town, as Goshachgunk, as it was then called, was the capital town of the Delaware nation. It was a significant crossroads traveled by Shawnee, Munsee, Wyandot, and other midwestern tribes, as well as Moravian missionaries, French traders, British armies, and eventually Revolution-era Americans, who pretty well destroyed it first chance they got. It returned as a trading and industrial center some sixty years later and hasn't changed a lot in mission since then.
I got to Spitler’s Restaurant about ten minutes late. Fortunately the gang was late too, so everyone was still looking at menus. I hadn’t told anyone I was coming, but they weren’t too surprised to see me either. I’m sort of known for my somewhat different take on day rides. elizilla says that it's a good idea bring a toothbrush when heading off on a day ride with me.
Lunch was buffet-style in the regional Amish idiom where all the food is shades of brown or yellow. Not that it wasn’t tasty; in fact, the trick was to not eat too much. It’s always a risk to stop at a smorgasbord when you’re riding. I managed to restrain myself, since this was a good day to eat lightly.
I was disappointed to find out that they were simply going to ride back to Columbus via a nice but fairly direct route. That just wouldn’t do. It was an absolutely perfect day. It had warmed up to the low 50s, which is about as nice as you can expect this time of year, and the roads were in perfect condition as well with very little crud. There haven’t been any winter treatments yet either. So I elected to press on on my own.
There are a few roads that I’ve been missing intensely since I moved up to Michigan, and I was determined to see as many of them as I could. There weren’t any other riders along to have to coordinate or synchronize with, so I stood a good chance of hitting more than a few of them. I headed east out of Coshocton on a couple of narrow, twisty county roads that led me over towards Tuscarawas County. My immediate goal was Route 258, which threads among the knobs and hilltops of the southeastern edge of Ohio’s Amish country.
I took a few pictures from the moving bike along here. Probably wasn’t the best idea, but the camera is tiny and, by wrapping the strap securely around my wrist, holding the camera upside down, and pressing the shutter release with my thumb, I was able to fire off a few decent shots without unduly endangering myself or others. Not that there were many others to endanger, other than an occasional buggy and a couple of young Amish children walking along the road. You hardly ever encounter traffic along here.
At Freeport I picked up Route 800 south, which was once a major route south out of the Cleveland/Akron area. Interstate 77 has picked up all this traffic, and I’m sure most folks who remember the old road are grateful. It is relentlessly twisty for its entire length from New Philadelphia until it runs into the Ohio River in Monroe County. It is now a sport rider’s dream, even more so now that it’s sporting brand new pavement. The upper end is mostly linked sweepers rather than really tight technical curves, although there are quite a few of those too.
One set of those tight curves, strangely enough, is right in the center the former town of Sewellsville in Belmont County. I say “former town” because there are a dozen or so old homes quite close to the road that are obviously abandoned, with broken windows and overgrown yards full of saplings. There is only one noticeably not-abandoned home in Sewellsville, one of those 1970s underground homes that is built into the side of a hill. Apparently it isn’t healthy to have your home sticking up out of the ground around here.
After about thirty miles of this, I pulled up parallel to I-70. I used the slab to jump across the Ohio River into West Virginia and then cruised down a dozen or so urban miles to Moundsville, named for the huge Adena-era ceremonial mound that once dominated the town. My goal was US250, another sport rider’s dream road. This is a much tighter, much more technical road than 800 is. It’s strung along a 30-mile-long ridgetop that traverses some of the most steeply pitched land in West Virginia. Most of the development happens on the ridgetops here since the valleys are extremely narrow and the hillsides are steep.
Unfortunately, it is also a fairly heavily trafficked road. There are few places to pass even if you have a fairly liberal interpretation of what constitutes a passing zone. Still, this was the only time all day that traffic got in my way, and slow cars invariably turn off within a mile or two. I stopped to apply some electrical tape to my shield to make a temporary sun visor. Even though I was heading east, technically, this road is so curvy that the sun is still quite often in your eyes. The road jumps from hilltop to hilltop and often the road itself is the crest of the ridgeline, with the land dropping away steeply on both sides of the road. Now that the leaves are off the sightlines are much better; you can see the road a few curves ahead of you as well as more distant views.
The early Euro-american settlers in this area appreciated the commanding ridgetop views as well, as evidenced by the historical markers that appeared regularly every few miles along Wind Ridge. Each marks the location of a frontier fort or “station” where local settlers could gather and defend themselves from the other folks who still maintained an interest in the area. I ruminated on just who needed protection from whom as the road gradually descended from the ridge and I crossed into Pennsylvania. The shadows were getting a lot longer, and eventually my sabre-shadow was riding along right beside me. Time to head back towards home.
There was still light and time for one more of my favorite routes, the PA18 / PA218 combination that bears northwest through Greene and Washington counties through picturesque countryside. These roads are largely streambottom roads, but old ones with pre-motor-vehicle alignments. Old roads don’t take up any space that could have been used for a farmer’s fields and gardens so they generally stick to the lower hillsides. There is a lot of vertical relief to these roads even if they are valley roads. Lots of fun.
When you’re in the valleys in western Pennsylvania, you’re in what probably used to be coal country. Every few miles there is a "coal patch," a clump of similar-looking old houses surrounding a store and a closed gas station. Adjacent to the patch is a large open area where the mine used to be, now used to park rusty machinery and old coal trucks picked clean of usable parts. You don’t see this stuff when you’re up swooping among the hilltops. The faded coal patches are a reminder of how the regional economy has changed since the Pittsburgh coal gave out forty years and more ago. Ironically, the towns carry such optimistic names as Amity and Prosperity, though the name of the nearby village of Good Intent is probably more accurate.
The rollercoasterlike 218 finally straightens out just in time to meet the I-70 oasis of truck stops as you reenter the 21st century. Now that I could actually see the sky and horizon again, I noticed that we were about to get a really nice sunset. I merged onto the interstate heading straight west into it. I briefly thought about heading farther north and getting the direct route back to Michigan via the turnpikes, but the weather was still relatively warm, the sunset was spectacular, and I remembered I was running short back home of whole bean coffee from my favorite roaster, Stauf’s in Columbus. One hundred fifty slab miles later (nearly half of which was framed by that fantastic sunset), I pulled into Grandview Heights and had a very tasty cup of Americano at Stauf’s as I restocked my coffee stash. I’d been anticipating that cup each of the previous hundred miles.
As I packed two pounds’ worth of Kaldi’s Blend into the sidecases, I remembered that several of my friends frequent a nearby smokehouse/brewpub on Friday evenings. I called W’s cellphone and sure enough, he was at Barley’s. I asked him to order me a sandwich, and it was set up on the bar just as I walked in about ten minutes later. It was actually pretty funny, since W and I had had lunch together at Coshocton about seven hours earlier. I ate with as much leisure as I could afford, still being two hundred miles from home after dark. It was nice visiting with W and his wife P, though; I don’t get to see them nearly as much as I used to.
Time to head north. I was pleased to find unleaded for $2.02 a gallon at the Flying J, so this was the cheapest of the five tanks of gas I ran through the Sabre on Friday. It was a fairly sedate trip back to Ann Arbor. There really wasn’t much traffic and I was able to light up the landing lights frequently. These really make a huge difference; they put out so much light on a focused beam that you can see fully twelve seconds ahead of you, and that makes for a lot less fatigue riding at night. On the downside, you sure do see more deer this way.
It was an uneventful trip back. I pulled back into the driveway almost exactly at midnight. I’d been gone almost fifteen hours and ridden 764 miles in four states, including a couple hundred high-quality twisty miles in three of them. It was about as good a ride as one can hope for this time of year. The elderly 96,000-mile Sabre performed flawlessly all day. Also about as good as you can expect of a twenty-one year old bike.
Saturday was a day for home maintenance and leaf raking. The weather was even better than Friday, and xtatic1, elizilla and I managed to squeeze in a late afternoon ride to the Dexter Cider Mill, where we had fresh doughnuts that were still warm and cider that had been squeezed an hour or two earlier. We stashed a couple gallons of cider in the bike and then followed elizilla as far as Hell, and then turned back for home. Probably not more than fifty or sixty miles all told, but it was a great ride just the same, and a nice change from riding by myself. North of the 40th Parallel, any November ride is a gift.
I left Ann Arbor a little after nine on Friday morning. It was about 220 miles to Coshocton, Ohio, where the group was meeting up for lunch at 12:30. I probably should have left a little earlier, but it’s hard to get moving quickly while it’s still below freezing. Weather was absolutely perfect but still about 30 degrees. When it’s below 40, I prefer to leave the Aerostich at home and wear the Motophoria Meridian/Radion outfit. I’ve never worn warmer gear. Both the ¾-length jacket and pants have removable thinsulate liners and work exceptionally well with electric gear, and the neck closure is totally effective keeping wind and rain out. The tradeoff is that it's nearly useless above 65 degrees. Along with the Gerbing jacket liner and gloves, though, it kept me toasty warm all day.
As I merged onto US23 south off I-94, I fell in behind an FJR1300 being ridden briskly towards Ohio. He was keeping a nice pace but had poor lane discipline so I didn’t follow too closely. He also didn’t have much gear on considering the near-freezing temperatures, and he was almost pathetically huddled up behind his windshield. Sometimes electric gear makes you feel downright smug. I used him as a rabbit down to the Ohio line, then ditched him south of Toledo.
I stayed on the US30 slab just past Mansfield to Hayesville, at which point I took the direct route to Coshocton over OH179, though Mohicanville to Nashville. The terrain got hillier and the road got progressively curvier as I got into moraine country, where the last glacier dumped some nice hills and valleys. South of here is essentially unglaciated. Southeastern Ohio is sort of a secret among riders. There is probably no greater concentration of fantastic riding roads in the country as there is here and continuing into northwestern West Virginia.
Ohio Route 60 is sort of the gateway to southeastern Ohio, along with the parallel-twenty-miles-east OH 83. Just about any road it crosses provides plenty of thrills. I was really enjoying the new pavement, because last time I was through here it was pretty torn up. Much of it had been underwater last fall during the floods that inundated the Ohio Valley in September and again in January. The town of Killbuck gets repeatedly submerged in these floods. It looks like it dried out okay this time. Most of the businesses were open, with a big crowd at the VFW hall.
After another fifteen miles of great twisties, the road along Killbuck creek abruptly dumps you into the Walhonding valley where, for the first time in a while, you see broad expanses of flat bottomland. The valley widened even wider as I approached Coshocton. The prism and towpath of the Walhonding Canal is still quite visible in places, especially as you approach its junction with the Ohio and Erie Canal at Roscoe, which still has a number of surviving lift locks. Roscoe Village has been overly restored to a nearly-genteel state that gives a poor impression as to what a canal town was really like.
Then I was in Coshocton, the first leg of the day's journey completed. Two hundred and fifty years ago Coshocton was possibly Ohio's largest town, as Goshachgunk, as it was then called, was the capital town of the Delaware nation. It was a significant crossroads traveled by Shawnee, Munsee, Wyandot, and other midwestern tribes, as well as Moravian missionaries, French traders, British armies, and eventually Revolution-era Americans, who pretty well destroyed it first chance they got. It returned as a trading and industrial center some sixty years later and hasn't changed a lot in mission since then.
I got to Spitler’s Restaurant about ten minutes late. Fortunately the gang was late too, so everyone was still looking at menus. I hadn’t told anyone I was coming, but they weren’t too surprised to see me either. I’m sort of known for my somewhat different take on day rides. elizilla says that it's a good idea bring a toothbrush when heading off on a day ride with me.
Lunch was buffet-style in the regional Amish idiom where all the food is shades of brown or yellow. Not that it wasn’t tasty; in fact, the trick was to not eat too much. It’s always a risk to stop at a smorgasbord when you’re riding. I managed to restrain myself, since this was a good day to eat lightly.
I was disappointed to find out that they were simply going to ride back to Columbus via a nice but fairly direct route. That just wouldn’t do. It was an absolutely perfect day. It had warmed up to the low 50s, which is about as nice as you can expect this time of year, and the roads were in perfect condition as well with very little crud. There haven’t been any winter treatments yet either. So I elected to press on on my own.
There are a few roads that I’ve been missing intensely since I moved up to Michigan, and I was determined to see as many of them as I could. There weren’t any other riders along to have to coordinate or synchronize with, so I stood a good chance of hitting more than a few of them. I headed east out of Coshocton on a couple of narrow, twisty county roads that led me over towards Tuscarawas County. My immediate goal was Route 258, which threads among the knobs and hilltops of the southeastern edge of Ohio’s Amish country.
I took a few pictures from the moving bike along here. Probably wasn’t the best idea, but the camera is tiny and, by wrapping the strap securely around my wrist, holding the camera upside down, and pressing the shutter release with my thumb, I was able to fire off a few decent shots without unduly endangering myself or others. Not that there were many others to endanger, other than an occasional buggy and a couple of young Amish children walking along the road. You hardly ever encounter traffic along here.
At Freeport I picked up Route 800 south, which was once a major route south out of the Cleveland/Akron area. Interstate 77 has picked up all this traffic, and I’m sure most folks who remember the old road are grateful. It is relentlessly twisty for its entire length from New Philadelphia until it runs into the Ohio River in Monroe County. It is now a sport rider’s dream, even more so now that it’s sporting brand new pavement. The upper end is mostly linked sweepers rather than really tight technical curves, although there are quite a few of those too.
One set of those tight curves, strangely enough, is right in the center the former town of Sewellsville in Belmont County. I say “former town” because there are a dozen or so old homes quite close to the road that are obviously abandoned, with broken windows and overgrown yards full of saplings. There is only one noticeably not-abandoned home in Sewellsville, one of those 1970s underground homes that is built into the side of a hill. Apparently it isn’t healthy to have your home sticking up out of the ground around here.
After about thirty miles of this, I pulled up parallel to I-70. I used the slab to jump across the Ohio River into West Virginia and then cruised down a dozen or so urban miles to Moundsville, named for the huge Adena-era ceremonial mound that once dominated the town. My goal was US250, another sport rider’s dream road. This is a much tighter, much more technical road than 800 is. It’s strung along a 30-mile-long ridgetop that traverses some of the most steeply pitched land in West Virginia. Most of the development happens on the ridgetops here since the valleys are extremely narrow and the hillsides are steep.
Unfortunately, it is also a fairly heavily trafficked road. There are few places to pass even if you have a fairly liberal interpretation of what constitutes a passing zone. Still, this was the only time all day that traffic got in my way, and slow cars invariably turn off within a mile or two. I stopped to apply some electrical tape to my shield to make a temporary sun visor. Even though I was heading east, technically, this road is so curvy that the sun is still quite often in your eyes. The road jumps from hilltop to hilltop and often the road itself is the crest of the ridgeline, with the land dropping away steeply on both sides of the road. Now that the leaves are off the sightlines are much better; you can see the road a few curves ahead of you as well as more distant views.
The early Euro-american settlers in this area appreciated the commanding ridgetop views as well, as evidenced by the historical markers that appeared regularly every few miles along Wind Ridge. Each marks the location of a frontier fort or “station” where local settlers could gather and defend themselves from the other folks who still maintained an interest in the area. I ruminated on just who needed protection from whom as the road gradually descended from the ridge and I crossed into Pennsylvania. The shadows were getting a lot longer, and eventually my sabre-shadow was riding along right beside me. Time to head back towards home.
There was still light and time for one more of my favorite routes, the PA18 / PA218 combination that bears northwest through Greene and Washington counties through picturesque countryside. These roads are largely streambottom roads, but old ones with pre-motor-vehicle alignments. Old roads don’t take up any space that could have been used for a farmer’s fields and gardens so they generally stick to the lower hillsides. There is a lot of vertical relief to these roads even if they are valley roads. Lots of fun.
When you’re in the valleys in western Pennsylvania, you’re in what probably used to be coal country. Every few miles there is a "coal patch," a clump of similar-looking old houses surrounding a store and a closed gas station. Adjacent to the patch is a large open area where the mine used to be, now used to park rusty machinery and old coal trucks picked clean of usable parts. You don’t see this stuff when you’re up swooping among the hilltops. The faded coal patches are a reminder of how the regional economy has changed since the Pittsburgh coal gave out forty years and more ago. Ironically, the towns carry such optimistic names as Amity and Prosperity, though the name of the nearby village of Good Intent is probably more accurate.
The rollercoasterlike 218 finally straightens out just in time to meet the I-70 oasis of truck stops as you reenter the 21st century. Now that I could actually see the sky and horizon again, I noticed that we were about to get a really nice sunset. I merged onto the interstate heading straight west into it. I briefly thought about heading farther north and getting the direct route back to Michigan via the turnpikes, but the weather was still relatively warm, the sunset was spectacular, and I remembered I was running short back home of whole bean coffee from my favorite roaster, Stauf’s in Columbus. One hundred fifty slab miles later (nearly half of which was framed by that fantastic sunset), I pulled into Grandview Heights and had a very tasty cup of Americano at Stauf’s as I restocked my coffee stash. I’d been anticipating that cup each of the previous hundred miles.
As I packed two pounds’ worth of Kaldi’s Blend into the sidecases, I remembered that several of my friends frequent a nearby smokehouse/brewpub on Friday evenings. I called W’s cellphone and sure enough, he was at Barley’s. I asked him to order me a sandwich, and it was set up on the bar just as I walked in about ten minutes later. It was actually pretty funny, since W and I had had lunch together at Coshocton about seven hours earlier. I ate with as much leisure as I could afford, still being two hundred miles from home after dark. It was nice visiting with W and his wife P, though; I don’t get to see them nearly as much as I used to.
Time to head north. I was pleased to find unleaded for $2.02 a gallon at the Flying J, so this was the cheapest of the five tanks of gas I ran through the Sabre on Friday. It was a fairly sedate trip back to Ann Arbor. There really wasn’t much traffic and I was able to light up the landing lights frequently. These really make a huge difference; they put out so much light on a focused beam that you can see fully twelve seconds ahead of you, and that makes for a lot less fatigue riding at night. On the downside, you sure do see more deer this way.
It was an uneventful trip back. I pulled back into the driveway almost exactly at midnight. I’d been gone almost fifteen hours and ridden 764 miles in four states, including a couple hundred high-quality twisty miles in three of them. It was about as good a ride as one can hope for this time of year. The elderly 96,000-mile Sabre performed flawlessly all day. Also about as good as you can expect of a twenty-one year old bike.
Saturday was a day for home maintenance and leaf raking. The weather was even better than Friday, and xtatic1, elizilla and I managed to squeeze in a late afternoon ride to the Dexter Cider Mill, where we had fresh doughnuts that were still warm and cider that had been squeezed an hour or two earlier. We stashed a couple gallons of cider in the bike and then followed elizilla as far as Hell, and then turned back for home. Probably not more than fifty or sixty miles all told, but it was a great ride just the same, and a nice change from riding by myself. North of the 40th Parallel, any November ride is a gift.