Yesterday was not my favourite day on the road. As we were travelling to Manheim Ron had investigated alternative routes in three places. The choices were to go over a mountain or around it. Just above Harrisburg there is such a choice. We agreed that going around the mountain was the better option but it certainly was not ideal.
The first part of the walk involved me dropping Ron off at the entrance to an expressway where the speed limit is 55 mph. It is also a bike route so it is acceptable, if not desirable, to walk on the road allowances. Ron wore his visibility vest for the first time. I drove ahead the agreed distance and started to walk back to meet Ron. I got about half a kilometre to the underpass of a bridge. The road allowance where I would have to walk was two feet wide and the road was very busy with transports and cars. I chickened out. What really bothered me was that I could not reach Ron on the walkie talkie because of the road noise. He made it and didn’t even see me at the other end of that tunnel until he reached the end.
The next stretch was fine. It involved walking on a service road beside the expressway. Then we were back on the expressway. When I first started walking back someone stopped to see if I had car trouble and drove off rather quickly when I said that Ron and I were walking to Canada. As I got onto the expressway road allowance I was yelled at by someone from a transport. It could have been the same transport that tried briefly to run Ron off the road. The most interesting part of the walk was when a freight train started to come down the tracks by the highway. It went very slowly. The engineer waved at Ron. One of the pictures here shows the train going along beside the
expressway. We were walking between the two. Another picture shows the mountain we avoided in the background. What I’m delighted by is that Ron assures me that we won’t have a similar day again.
The good thing about yesterday was that the weather was perfect walking weather - enough to bring the bugs out, big flying ants.
Today we were back on more rural routes but there was lots of rain and hills. The countryside is beautiful with a particularly lovely area outside Halifax that is lined with gorgeous trees. A local said he thought they were a form of ash tree. This man had come up to Ron as Ron was resting at the end of a driveway. ‘You OK?’ he asked. Ron explained what he was doing and the man said, ‘Me too!’ The man had also had bypass surgery and he makes a point of walking regularly the four miles to Halifax filling a shopping bag with roadside litter. He dumps the garbage at the grocery store and then buys his groceries placing them in the same bag to return home. Two other folks stopped to see if we were alright today, too. It was a good but tiring day with too many hills and too many starts and stops because of rain. We’re glad to be resting tonight! Pictures:
'The Statue of Liberty' in the middle of the Susquehanna
The road before the expressway/service road divide
The expressway and service road side by side
The mountain to the right is the one we avoided
We walked between the traffic and the train on the road allowance
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