Today, I did something I’ve always wanted to do. I also did something I hope I never do again.

I’ve always wanted to ride on a velodrome. By pure chance, or maybe it’s on purpose, I’m not sure, but the Pennsylvania bicycle route L goes right by the Lehigh Valley Velodrome in Trexlertown.

I was standing there basking in the bicycle-ness of the place when somebody came by and asked me if I’d like to do a few laps. I didn’t want to get in the way of anyone, but when I finally got a glimpse of the inside, there was nobody riding on it anyway, so I followed his directions onto the velodrome. Just before I got onto the track, I strapped the camera onto the front handlebar so I could capture the event.

I’d love to share that video with you all, but it’s going to have to wait because we’re camping tonight and we don’t have internet access or cellphone service. I’ve had to drive several miles into town in order to post this entry. It’s a slow connection so uploading a 10 megabyte video is just out of the question today. I will post it later when I get a chance.

The thing that I did today that I hope I never do again is to ride on the Bake Oven Road in Pennsylvania north of the town of German Corners and south of highway 895. This road takes you over the first ridge of the Appalachian Mountains. Yes, we’re back in the mountains again. The problem with this road is 1) it’s not paved, 2) it’s very steep (some sections are probably 10% grade), 3) the upside was recently given a fresh coat of tar over the gravel, so the smaller gravel would stick to my tire and then get wedged in between my tire and my fender, and 4) the downside was not recently tarred, but it was a fairly loose and bumpy and steep stretch of road that I covered at about 3 miles per hour. As frustrating as this 3-mile stretch of road was, I made it though OK. It just took some time.

Since arriving in Pennsylvania, Pat and I have been noticing that some of the country houses and barns have decorations on the sides of them. Sometimes it’s a simple star, like these:

Other buildings have some more elaborate decorations, like these:

What’s the reason for these decorations? They’re called “hex signs” as it turns out. Here’s a link to nice page with an explanation:

Pennsylvania Dutch Hex Signs

This entry was posted on Friday, June 16th, 2006 at 2:02 pm and is filed under The Dream Tour, Bicycling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.