Last Sunday, Corey came up with the idea of hiring bicycles and cycling up to Maryland and Great Falls National Park, and despite misgivings about the combination of sun, heat, lack of shade and the exercise inherent in cycling it turned out to be a very good idea.
I've never really associated cycling with America, but coming from Cambridge it seems pretty natural now, and fortunately the route up to Great Falls (or rather, the route we took) only had two major hills, both followed by equally (and probably more so) major downhill stints.
The round trip should have been about 28 miles, but we took a wrong turn on the way, and ended up cycling along the roads instead of the cycle path alongside the Potomac river. It seemed like a shame at the time, but it meant that we cycled there and back on different paths so at least got to see two different types of scenery - middle suburban America on the way there, white picket fences and all, and scenic national park America on the way back.
Admittedly the way back was nicer, primarily because it was flatter, but some of the neighbourhoods on the way there were interesting if only for their flagrant illustrations of what happens when you try to build a house to reflect, and go one better, than the one next door. At times it felt like cycling along Wisteria Lane.
At first it seemed that the Great Falls were anything but great, and looked little more than a weir, which would have been just a little disappointing. Fortunately though we were looking at the wrong bit, and buried behind the trees were the Great Falls themselves, and there were significantly greater than your everyday average weir.
The scale of the whole thing was breathtaking. When I was on the Amtrak train across America last year I got a sense of the scale of the country, but I didn't actually get to experience it behind sat in a steel train carriage. Cycling back through the park it was hard to believe that we were only 15 miles or so outside of Washington DC and not in the middle of Yellowstone or something similar. It really was like being in one of those cinematic Hollywood films. Everything is just so huge and dramatic looking, but naturally so. Looking over to the horizon, the park just seemed to continue on and when we emerged at the end, the river just dumped us into downtown DC as if it was the most natural place in the world.
Thankfully our $25 hire-bikes were pretty trouble free, despit two incidents of chains coming off, Charlie's brakes locking on, and Alex's bike refusing to change gear - a state of affairs that Emily had to remedy on more than one occasion.
On the way back we noticed that the place we hired the bikes from also hired canoes and rowing boats on the Potomac, I doubt we'd make 35 miles, but I'd be up for giving it a try.
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