Prepping for the Pittsburgh to DC (to Cville?) trip

Planning

Assembling the team

I am a cheap (frugal?) version of Tony Stark, Jeff is Captain America and Paul is Thor.
My teammates would probably disagree with my character assignments.  ;-) 

Jeff was in from the beginning. From multiple Shenandoah 100's, century road rides, and our recent double century, Jeff is the faster rider between the two of us. But two people doing 335 miles is still a bit lonely. I wanted to recruit a few more. Building teams can be a tricky proposition. You want people capable for the job and have the right attitude when things get tough. People who have grit-yet were still cheery and constructive. Fortunately, many riders who do 100 plus mile rides exhibit these characteristics. 

Paul was someone who came to mind. I first met Paul on an evening road ride. Coming back from a stomach bug illness, I had lost 10 pounds and wanted to see if losing that weight made me a faster climber. A tall skinny rider in front of me was riding up Bonnie Branch with no hands. No hands. Perfect target. But the harder I cranked, the further away he rolled. That night I introduced myself to Paul and found him to be a totally chill rider-that could crank out a ton of watts. After friending him on Strava, I saw a number of 100 to 150+ mile solo rides and realized this was someone who would enjoy this trip.

A number of other strong riders wanted to join, but we couldn't work out the right schedules. So it was just the three of us locked and loaded to go.

Logistics

Distance. 335 miles. 2 days. Tough-but doable. Everyone seemed comfortable with the milage.  Paul plotted the route and eventually tacked on another 40 miles to finish in Catonsville. 375 miles. Check.

375 mile route! Thank Paul for adding an additional 40 miles to our route to finish back home.

Direction. Which direction then? Everyone agreed that they would rather do a Pittsburgh to DC trip as opposed to a DC to Pittsburgh. No one wanted a long drive back home after a long bike ride. The elevation profile really wasn't a factor in our planning.

Food. Since this wasn't a sight seeing trip, the plan was to pack all our food with us. I entertained the idea of group dinners, but that would have been too complicated to pack with the time constraint.

Get some delicious iodine flavored
water from the C&O pumps!

Water. The GAP and C&O trails had water pumps stationed along the trail. C&O said they usually turned off the water supply in mid November. The GAP said late October after the first freeze. This detail got a little dicey as we were planning on riding October 27-28.  At worse case we would bring camel back bladders and load them up at the towns we passed. This would add time to our trip.

Daylight. We were planning on riding a good number of miles in the dark. We needed to make sure we had enough battery supply to run the lights. At worse case we thought, only the front biker needed lights.

1st Hammock setup with trees
too close together . .  .

Sleeping.  Bike camping. The C&O had a number of hiker/biker campsite available, so we just planned on hitting one of them. As opposed to tents, we all started to setup hammock systems. Paul already had an advanced hammock system. Jeff needed to buy one. I had already hacked a cheapo system together that I wanted to try.

Getting to the start. Buses and trains were an option, but renting a mini van with 3 people was so much easier. We could load and depart on our own schedule. 150 for the rental plus gas and tolls, it was the obvious answer.

Gear

Next time-a trailer!

Never having been on a bike camping trip, there was a number of items that both Jeff and I had to figure out. Paul had already cleaned out REI and his local bike stores with a full bike backing setup.

Bike. I suppose the most important equipment to consider is the bike. One of my goals was to keep this as frugal as possible, so I decided to retro fit an existing bike. I wanted to adapt my 2010 Gary Fisher Paragon hard tail. I was either going to put skinner tires on my Stans Arch EX rims or find a pair of cyclocross wheels. After much wheel research and inquiries, a friend of mine said he had a pair of spare cyclocross wheels I could borrow. Everything on the wheels matched up and there wasn't much retro fitting except for a cassette swap.

Jeff didn't have a hard tail. He had a beautiful full squish carbon Niner. He was looking to mount skinnier wheels and call it a day. He bought some 622x32 Continental Gator skins and threw them on. Well-they didn't actually go on that easily. It took three people to mount them.

Wheels. While we are on the subject of bikes, lets talk about wheel sizes. On a dry run with Paul, I went on a  trip up and along the National Central Railroad trail with my road bike that was fitted with 622x25  Continental 4000s II.  The 25's did okay, although I would have felt more comfortable coming at speed with 28's or larger.

For the GAP trail, you could get by with 28's, but the C&O is a bit rougher, especially after it rains. 32's or wider were recommended. Thankfully, the wheels I borrowed were 35's which seemed to have the right blend of width with speed. Both Jeff and Paul ended up running 32's on the trail and were good.

Carrying system and bags. With the bikes and wheels locked down, it was time to figure out how to carry everything. Since my mountain bike didn't have any rack bolts, I explored a few bike bag options.  Specially, I looked for a large seat bag, triangle bag, and handle bar bags. I checked out the sensible likes of Green Guru, the affordable Banjo Brothers, and the high end Revelate Designs.  Since this hardware would be used for future bike packing expeditions, I didn't mind spending a little extra for a quality bag. The 14 L Terrapin System really appealed to me but I discovered that there were minimum clearance requirements between the tire and the seat.  Paul apparently had the entire Revelate lineup so I went over to see what would fit and not fit.

I would have love to use this bag, but didn't have the  9 inch clearance
on my bike. Even the Pika would be a tight fit. 

Sadly the Terrapin wouldn't fit under my seat and even the smaller Pika would be iffy. And I realized just how small the triangle on my bike. It barely fit my 24 ounce water bottle with no room for a second. So I needed to look for other options.

Ghetto PVC + seat post rack. 

Notice how the PVC doesn't have any
end caps? This will bite me later . . 

I had a seat post rack picked up from the local annual Bike Swap. I then found this durable 6 dollar 20 Liter Dry Bag at Wally Mart. Perfect. With a few Flat Bungee Cords, this strapped securely onto the bike rack. A modification done later, was to add a piece of PVC to extend the 4 inch width of the track rack to 18-20 inches. The bar was used for additional torsional stability.
Having a 20 Liters of capacity bag was great. The one downfall around this design is that it's not easily accessible. The sleeping system and items I would need the second day would all fit in the bag, but I would still require quick access storage options.

Out came a Bontrager seat bag where I loaded it with two tubes, tire irons, CO2, and a multi tool. I then bought a cockpit bag to fit on top my top tube. I could have bought the Revelate gas tank bag, but I wanted a see through phone holder that could be useful on future rides since I don't have a Garmin. Since rain was in the forecast, I would simply wrap my phone in a zip lock bag.

The final place where I could carry items was my handle bars. At first, I was just going to strap a compress or dry bag to the handle bars but looking at how Revelate created their mount, they created a space so the bags wouldn't crush the shifter and brake cables. Hmmm-I wanted to figure out how to make a spacer. I'll need to go into another blog post on that, but in the end, I created this contraption:

Front view

My uncut fork stem provided a way to secure
the handle bar mount.

Add zip ties to secure it all.

It worked well enough to strap an old fanny pack I had. Now I had a few easily accessible options during the ride.

Sleeping system.  Since we were bike camping, we had to figure out how were going to spend the night. Hammock camping. While tents are great-hammocks are awesome! I spent a few weeks before the trip camping with my son's Boy Scout trop along the C&O and the Brunswick Family Camp grounds. I tested out sleeping in the hammock over night for the first time. I had a cheap hammock that I picked up on Amazon for less than 20, but I didn't have a rain fly. I've always wanted to make one myself out of some silicon nylon, but there was no time. I opted for this tarp which seem to balance the best of cost and long term durability.  I also brought along my existing Z Lite mattress pad because I heard hammockers have been known to get cold bottoms when sleeping.

Two nights before we tested setting up our gear in the dark. This helped
shake out any kinks in our packing order as it was expected to rain
our first night.

Batteries. With potentially 12-15 hours of night time riding in our future we talked how we could possibly alternate riding with lights or just have the first person riding with lights. I mean, we were just riding on gravel travel. What could POSSIBLY go wrong? I had one decent battery that went with a Magic Shine clone I bought from Amazon. I needed more juice and and ended up going with this 10000 mAH battery from eBay for 53 dollars. They are built with Panasonic batteries which are supposedly some of the best in the industry. My prior battery pack is built with Panasonic batteries and they are still holding up after two years of continual use.

Testing them, I was able to run them on high for over 7 hours. On low, this battery would definitely give me enough juice for the trip.  The one downfall is that the connector seal on the battery doesn't quite fit in. There is an o-ring on the male section of the plug that doesn't pop into the female section. I will need to figure out an adapter later.

Huge 10200 mAh battery from eBay!

Water Bottle Holders.  Jeff showed me this great blog post on bike camping hacks. The first article showed me how to store an extra water bottle cage using electrical tape. Cheap and easy to setup.

Final Bike Setup

Looked something like this. I was still missing the cockpit bag, the PVC pipe stabilizer, my Crocs and about 10 more pounds of gear and food. But you get the idea.

What's next?

The trip-which will be coming shortly . . .