Monday, September 1, 2014

Day 3 on the Great Allegheny Passage

 
8/26/14
Rockwood to Ohiopyle (33 miles)
 
We are glad that our Road Scholar GAP trip substituted a tour of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water house for the “white water rafting” included in past Road Scholar GAP offerings after seeing many rafts lazily drifting down the shallow river with passengers frying in the sun, and people in duckies trying to pull their little inflatables off rocks.  There seems to be hardly any navigable white water to be found.  It looks to be a very hot and boring way to spend a few hours.  Meanwhile, we are riding through verdant woods above and beside the river most of the day.   

Here are some photos from today's travels:
 
 
 
 

At Confluence, we stop in at a nice little bike shop across the street from a shady town square park with an old fashioned band shell.  We document the moment with a group photo.
 
 
 

Just a few miles past Confluence, we enter the Ohiopyle State Park, where we are riding through the woods, paralleling the river, and enjoying glorious shade.  Little springs emerge between the layers of rocks where the rail bed was cut from the side of a mountain.  We are enjoying riding through the woods so much that we do not stop to take pictures. Look at tomorrow's blog--we will still be riding in the park for about seven more miles then. 


The Falls at Ohiopyle
We end today's ride in Ohiopyle, a town in the middle of the park.  A beautiful, but somewhat modest in size waterfall has been attracting visitors to Ohiopyle since the railroad got here in 1871.  We head to the Firefly Café for ice cream before boarding the bus back to Laurelville. 

Tonight we have a fancy multicourse dinner out at the fanciest restaurant around.   They let us bring our own wine, providing the only officially sanctioned wine drinking evening of this entire program, since all our other dinners are at the Mennonite Retreat Center.  I seem to be the only one at our table who is very excited about having a chance to drink wine, and despite sharing tasting samples with the other five people at my table, I am pretty much left to consume the bottle on my own.  At least I don’t feel like I am drinking alone--everyone else has a bit of wine in their glasses for most of the meal--they are very polite about slowly nursing their little samples, never actually coming right out and saying that they didn’t much cotton to my beloved J. Lohr Chardonnay.

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