June 14: Westminster, Maryland to Newark, Delaware
We picked up another state today! I rode into Delaware at the very end of today’s 86 mile ride across the Maryland countryside. Delaware is our twentieth state. We’re approaching the halfway mark of The Dream Tour in a number of ways: States (20 out of 48), mileage (4,100 out of 10,000), number of days on the road (89 out of 217). Wow! It’s hard to believe we’ve come so far!
Maryland has some great roads for cycling. They also have a map which rates most of the major roads in the state as to its suitability for cycling. Green roads have 8 foot wide paved shoulders or very low traffic volumes, blue roads have 4 foot wide shoulders, etc. I spent most of the day on either green roads or local country roads with little or no traffic at all. It was so nice!
There was one dicey stretch, however. Crossing the Susquehanna River (at Conowingo) was enough to give any cyclist the heebie-jeebies. I stopped at a park about half a mile from the crossing. I was actually just looking for water, but there was a state trooper in his squad car having lunch. I said hello and asked him what the crossing (it’s actually a dam, not a bridge) was like. Pointing towards the road, he said “Well, the road acrosss the dam is pretty much like what you see here, but there’s no shoulder.” Roads around here with “no shoulders” actually have a shoulder that I would have been thankful for while riding through the South, so I wasn’t too worried (yet) about “no shoulders”. I asked him what his advice would be to a cyclist who wanted to cross. I was hoping he would point me towards a pedestrian path or something, but his response was “when you get on the dam”, he said, pausing to swallow a bit of his sandwich, “get across it as quickly as possible.” So, basically, his advice was to sprint across the one mile dam. I thanked him and as I rode away he advised me to “stay safe”. Now that’s some advice I can use!
As you approach the river crossing from the west, there’s a fairly steep descent and a curve so you can’t really see what’s ahead on the road. By the time you do see it, you’re committed to going across. And the trooper was right. There’s no shoulder. Well, there might be six inches or so to the right of the white line, but for the first quarter of the dam, there’s a building that starts about six inches from the white line, so it’s nearly impossible to make use of any of the shoulder.
I was doing OK sprinting across the dam until I spotted an 18-wheeler in my rear view mirror. And there was no way I was going to reach the other side of the dam before he reached me. There wasn’t anything I could do except to keep “sprinting” as best I could. The driver was nice though. I think he realized I was doing everything I could to stay out of his way. He slowed and waiting for oncoming traffic to pass before he passed me.
I took a few pictures of the Maryland scenery thoughout the day:
