Harrisburg mini bike tour

[ginacico]

(…Continued)

Once in York, about a mile of the trail was closed for improvements, but it was very well marked. By then we were well within the city street grid, exploring and sniffing around for breakfast.

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From York we rode across the Susquehanna to Columbia PA. This is Peter taking a selfie on the Wrightsville-Columbia bridge.

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There we picked up the Northwest Lancaster County River Trail, which took us a good distance towards Harrisburg. We hit the “undeveloped” section in Conoy PA, and after my PQSFCOT trying to negotiate rough singletrack on a loaded bike, we opted for roads the rest of the way.

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Somewhat of a surprise to me (Peter was navigating), our route took us right past Three Mile Island, where the nuclear meltdown of 1979 was marked with a historic sign, and the Exelon campus is welcoming with shade trees and picnic tables. We didn’t linger long, or drink the water.

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Harrisburg was having a big holiday festival along the river, which we got to just before it closed and vendors started packing up. We found ourselves at a brewpub, being served burgers and beer, during the only real rain of our trip. A bike shop in Camp Hill had held our bike cases (shipped via UPS) until we picked them up, packed up our bikes, and rode Amtrak back to DC.

[ginacico]

Bikes? What bikes?!?

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Open box, out jumps bike. Cool trick! With new, metallic blue bar tape no less (bar tape tends to get mangled in packing).

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[KLizotte]

I’m fascinated by your collapsible bike. Are those 700 cc wheels? How long does it take to pack/unpack a bike? Very cool trip!

[ginacico]

Thanks! 😎 I haven’t had much practice packing yet, but so far about 1.5 hours to break down and maybe 2 hours to reassemble. Certain things have to be done in the right order, but it’s pretty straightforward.

The wheels are 700c, and I’ve got chunky 40mm tires, which have to be deflated to zip the case closed. The case is 26x26x10, airline regulation size baggage, which doesn’t leave a lot of tolerance. And because the Vaya has a wide rear hub spacing, it’s a tight fit to get all the pieces into the box. We sewed neoprene + Velcro wraps for the frame, and I made a special “cozy” for the brake disks, which get removed. I wound up carrying the rear rack with my panniers.

I’m sure every time we do a trip like this, I’ll refine the process to get it all to fit and be better protected. This time I learned that bar tape may be sacrificed while wedging the handlebars in between wheel spokes. Eek.

We like the potential of doing one-way and/or car-free trips made accessible by public transit, but a whole lot of logistics (pre-shipping the cases, having all the right tools) have to be worked out.

Amtrak has changed their baggage regulations, technically these are too big now, but as carry-on luggage nobody asks questions. Amtrak also claims they’ll have roll-on service for ALL routes within a year (…not holding my breath).

[wheelswings]

@ginacico 140722 wrote:

Open box, out jumps bike. Cool trick!

Wow, that must’ve taken a lot of planning!
So out pops your [Bike]-in-the-Box, you spend a couple hours assembling, and then what do you do with the box itself? Seems like it would be quite cumbersome to hitch to a rack…

[ginacico]

@wheels&wings 140739 wrote:

So out pops your [Bike]-in-the-Box, you spend a couple hours assembling, and then what do you do with the box itself? Seems like it would be quite cumbersome to hitch to a rack…

My case has a handle and wheels, Peter’s case conveniently fits inside mine. So when they’re empty, it’s one “box.”

For this trip, we pre-shipped (before we left home) the cases via UPS to a bike shop in Harrisburg, who held them until we arrived. I opened a UPS account and have gotten wiser about the shipping routine.

After we picked the “box” up at the bike shop, we briefly tried towing it behind his bike, but that didn’t work out too well. Instead we hopped on a local bus to the Amtrak station, where we disassembled the bikes on the sidewalk. There was an hour or so where we locked them to a bike rack, just so we could go get lunch, and worried the bomb squad might think they’re suspicious packages!

On other trips we’ve done the opposite, where get to our starting point and assemble the bikes, then have to ship the cases back home.

The cases are a pain, for sure, we spend a lot of energy worrying about them.

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