One last day in the Pennsylvania mountains and then we pedal home. We were headed for Lake Wallenpaupack and staying at a cottage owned by Catheryn and Jack Reisch, the aunt and uncle of Dan's wife Lynn Weckworth. On Dan's two previous trips he stopped here on the last night before home.

This area is familiar territory to Dan. He went to college in La Plume before heading off to the Marines and Viet Nam. We rode past the college and he said it looked pretty much like it did when he was there, except they had built a new gym.

All I know is that there are too many mountains to cross and not enough valleys to follow. When looking at a map, you can see all the stinking mountain ranges going north and south and if you are heading east, all you are doing is going up and down.

I had run out of energy yesterday and I spent a good part of last night figuring out why and doing what I could to regenerate. I got the disco out of my head and tried filling it with positive thoughts and thinking about what we had accomplished on this journey.

I think what I had done a couple of days ago was start celebrating my victory before the game was over. It was like the basketball team that has a big lead in the fourth quarter, thinks the game is won, has an emotional letdown, the other team charges back and they can't regain their momentum.

That's where I was. It was late in the game, I was ahead and the mountains made a vicious comeback. It took me a while to regain my momentum, but I could feel it returning.

I was riding fairly strong when Nat came back from scouting the road ahead and said traffic near Scranton was a mess and there wasn't a good way to ride through a short stretch of Rt. 6.
I'm a rather big fan of singer Harry Chapin and he wrote a nearly great song about a truck full of 100,000 pounds of bananas careening down a mountain and wrecking in Scranton. All I could think about was 100,000 pounds of bananas bouncing off my bicycle on Day 29. We may have eaten that many on the trip, but I didn't want them to end the ride.

So we put the bikes on the van, ate some bananas, and drove through the nasty traffic. I tend to stiffen up a good bit when I take breaks that are too long and this was one of them. Since Dan and I are dumb but not stupid, we hit the road again on our bikes from the top of a hill. But coasting doesn't help re-warm the legs and when we got to the bottom it was hard cranking back up.

We rode into the nice town of Carbondale and wound through town. Heading out of town was another long, lung-buster hill. I've had about enough of these in Pennsylvania but I kept my feet moving as fast as I could and broke out into more songs from the ‘70s, this time it was Queen, “I love to ride my bicycle, I love to ride my. I love to ride bicycle, I love to ride it where I like.” I am so joyous there isn't anyone around to hear me.

The hill was long and winding and it wasn't long before I couldn't see Dan behind me. I was going strong, but not that strong. At the top, I waited for him at a large intersection. After a little while, I saw him coming but he was coming real slow. Dan had hit a hole and the air was slowly escaping his rear tire. By the time he got to the top, it was flat. We knew Nat was close with the van, so he came back.

We carry spare tubes on our bikes along with CO2 cartridges to inflate the tires. One little cartridge immediately fills the tire to the right pressure, but it is easier and cheaper to use the hand pump. Dan decided to put on a new tire and tube so he wouldn't have to figure out exactly what happened to the old one. This was Dan's second flat and I had only had one during the whole trip.

We headed out again and the weather was starting to look nasty. The forecast was for afternoon thunderstorms throughout the entire eastern part of the country and we kept our eye out for them. We really didn't need to watch that closely, since they found us. It started sprinkling and then raining. Nat was just ahead and we stopped at the van.

The storms were here and we packed up everything in the van and drove to the lake where we enjoyed a great home-cooked meal. My first real meal in over a month.

Dan heads for more Pennsylvania hills.

Our route followed the Susquehanna River.

Late in the day I was hoping they had misspelled pedal.