I am newer to bike travel, but I found a bike ride that I wanted to do that stretched from Cockeysville, MD to York, PA – about 40 miles of travel trail total. I figured I wouldn’t be up for the trek back as well, so we turned it into a weekend trip to Pennsylvania. Any excuse to travel!
A bit blurry – but with a 7 am start, this is as good as it gets!
While my bike ride was wonderful – a beautiful sunny day, lots of friendly bikers on the trail- York was not in the least what we expected, and so while we made the best of a couple of days away from home, we don’t imagine we’ll be going back soon (or ever again…). I am usually very upbeat about our weekend travel – but I just can’t get excited about this one. And we realized, we hardly took any pictures!
One thing that is really cool about a lot of the bike trails in this area is that many of them follow the old railroad lines. Some stops along the way, take this history and bring it to life!
Despite the images the names York and Lancaster might conjure up in your mind, they are both rough smaller cities that seem to have a large homeless and drug-addicted populations. Within less than an hour of arriving in York, a woman in her car screamed out her window that she didn’t care if she hit me, and another drunk man (this is at 1:00 pm by the way) staggered in front of my bike, pretending to try and knock me off. Erin wasn’t meeting me until later in the evening, and so after I found a sandwich shop, I hid in our B&B for the rest of the night.
While York did not meet our expectations, our B&B Grace Manor was wonderful! The owners were friendly and had lots of tips for things that we should do. And, the breakfast was AMAZING: pineapple french toast, poached pears, hash brown quiche -so wonderful!
The rooms were also themed – we had the Asian room, but there was also a French room and a Mexican room.
While one may think that we went to Gettysburg – that would mean you don’t know us well! Instead, we hit up the Mason Dixon Wine Trail – hitting three different wineries. While it was fun experiencing some PA wines, we really only loved Seven Valleys Winery which felt like or old wine home Satori. This winery had a large pond with a beautiful deck that overlooked the vineyards. This was by far our favorite stop of the day.
Later we headed back to York for dinner and hit up a tap room so I could try a couple of local brews 🙂
Monday morning, after an amazing breakfast once more, we headed out to Lancaster. While we grabbed lunch in the city, we were really there to explore Amish country. And we weren’t disappointed. By far the prettiest landscape of the weekend, there were rolling hills and quiet farms (sans electricity) that lined the road. We got stopped behind a buggy or two and saw a number of Amish children travel by on their bikes and foot scooters. It must have been washing day because each house had lines and lines of drying clothes.
We headed home fairly early to get ready for the week – which I can hardly believe is almost over! As Labor Day weekend typically signals the end of summer, I am excited for Fall and am waiting eagerly for the leaves to begin to change!