Linking Up: Planning Your Traffic-Free Bike Trip Between Pittsburgh, PA and Washington, DC - 3rd Edition - Softcover

Mary Shaw; Roy Weil

Softcover

ISBN 10: 097921081X ISBN 13: 9780979210815

Publisher: Great Allegheny Press, 2007

Synopsis

An updated fourth edition has now (Mar 2012) been published. If you search Amazon for "978-0972732451" you will find it.

The trails of the Allegheny Trail Alliance connect with the C&O Canal Towpath at Cumberland, creating a traffic-free route between Pittsburgh and Washington DC. Although the final gap into Pittsburgh won't be finished for another year or two, the distance of 335 continuous miles on the ground make an outstanding bike trip. To help you plan this trip -- or a shorter trip along this route -- this book has brought together most of the information that you will need to plan your trip. This Third Edition (Aug 2007) is 48 pages and includes all of the information in the previous editions and more. The table of B&B, motels, restaurants and grocery stores has been updated. Several shorter itineraries have been added. In addition a mile by mile mileage table showing each mile and associated town has been added.

About this title

About the Author:

Mary Shaw and Roy Weil have canoed, biked, hiked, and XC-skied Western Pennsylvania for over 40 years. Many people have introduced them to trails, and they return the favor by writing guide books. They wrote Linking Up to encourage people to make extended trips on the trail between Pittsburgh and Washington. They also wrote FreeWheeling Easy in Western Pennsylvania. This guidebook covers the easy traffic-free bicycling and walking trails in and around Pennsylvania west of US219. All of the trails in this 244 page guidebook are free of automobile traffic. Most are on wide smooth gentle paths, rather than rough, steep, undeveloped trails. There are trails for short family outings and trails for multi-day touring. They also edited the definitive Canoeing Guide to Western Pennsylvania. The guides covers the canoeable waters that run westward out of Pennsylvania via the Ohio River. It includes some streams from neighboring areas, as well, The guide is the result of volunteer effort over the past 30 years by many, many canoeists, working through the Pittsburgh Council, American Youth Hostels . It is currently in its eighth edition, covering about 3000 miles of rivers in 470 pages.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

From the Introduction

So you’re thinking about a bike ride between Pittsburgh PA and Washington DC, and you don’t want to ride in traffic? That’s great! The C&O Canal Towpath has long been a favorite route, especially nice for bicycle camping. Now that the connection to the rail-trails of the Great Allegheny Passage between Cumberland MD and Pittsburgh PA is within reach, the route is even better.

We begin with answers to the questions that people most often ask as they start to think about the trip, followed by suggestions about things to think about as you plan and ideas about itineraries. At the end, we list some of the services and amenities you may find helpful and give a table of distances between towns. With a few exceptions, we include all the services we know about that are within reasonable cycling distance of the trail. If you have a support car you can range farther afield, but other guides provide better coverage of those larger areas than we can possibly hope to.

Trail construction continues, so if you’re looking ahead to a vacation in the next two or three years, you’ll find more trail and smaller gaps.

About this edition

• Publisher: Great Allegheny Press
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 097921081X
• ISBN 13: 9780979210815
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 3
• Number of pages: 48