There are no useful stats for day 5 and I was a bit late updating on this taking care of things...

I had decided I didn't want to continue west from Raystown Lake for a variety of reasons.  I wasn't feeling too confident with my hammock setup, and my route past Ohio just didn't interest me a lot.  My new plan was to head back home and have some fun with a bunch of shorter PA trips throughout the year and keep the possibility of a longer trip in the fall.  This left me in a bit of an odd spot for what do with with my last day in Raystown.  The camping for the mountain bike event has ended, and leaving to a new town means I can't get another day of mountain bike riding in.  So my plan was to take a slow morning and enjoy the breakfast provided, and then head to Lewistown where I could find somewhere to stay and wash some clothes.

The weather was looking like I was going to have a solid tailwind for my now eastbound trip.  I grabbed a few bagels for breakfast and headed out in a good mood.  After a few up and down hills, I noticed I didn't have my GPS on me that I left to charge and turned back for it.  I only wasted ten or fifteen minutes, but that made me a bit angry.  As I approached the turn for the campground on a downhill sections, I noticed I had a car behind me so I signaled I was turning left and made my turn a van waiting to exit the lot.   The combination of me moving too fast, worrying about the cars, slick tires on inflated pretty hard, and a pile of junk on my bike caused me to wash out on the gravel in the turn and crash. 

When I hit I knew I scraped my hand up some, and the guy in the van had his window open and asked if I was okay.  I of course bounce back up to my feet and say yeah I'm fine because that's the way I am.  Then I noticed the blood pouring down past my left eye and had second thoughts about my assessment of the situation.  Brett, who I learned has good bike first aid skills, hopped out of the van when he noticed I may have been mistaken with the I'm fine comment.  With the help of his assistants including his wife, Brett managed to get the bleeding stopped enough for me to figure out what was going on and what happened.  My sunglasses snapped near the hinge turning into what would be a great survival knife if the situation called for it.  This sliced right into my eyebrow.  My helmet which was only a week old Lazer helmet I found on clearance did a great job of keeping the rest of my head intact.  Sadly the helmet lost it's life in the process.  For some stupid reason I wasn't wearing gloves at the time so I scraped up my hands pretty badly as well.  

Brett and crew had to take off, and a the Raystown Mountain Bicycling Association (RMBA) guys who were running the event were hoping to spend some time hanging out in a hospital waiting for somebody to staple my head back together.  The story gets boring from this part forward.  My stuff was tossed in or on Josh's (of RMBA) car and we headed over to some random hospital in Huntingdon and sat around for a while talking.  This would have been a terrible wait alone.  I also got a chance to figure out my plans for getting home.  "Happy mothers day, I'm in the hospital" worked pretty well. 

Thanks to everyone who helped me out.

23.2 Miles

I was up with the sun as I normally am while camping and that gave me the perfect chance to take some great photos.  I headed down to the lake the area was named for with a delightfully light bike.  I got to the picnic beach and it was nice and quiet with great lighting coming from the rising sun.  Everything was perfect until I went to take some pictures and found that my camera wouldn't focus properly.  After much experimenting around with all the possible settings, I managed to take one shot and then headed back to the camp area to try and figure out what was going wrong.    I eventually figured out the lens was the problem and it wouldn't focus on anything further than about 10 feet away.  So take a minute to savor the last photo of the trip.

There were plenty of other things going on during the day with vendors setup and opening ceremonies.  Nothing much exciting happened here other than I managed to cut myself gently laying my bike down on the ground.  The lady at the REI booth managed to scrounge up a bandaid so I would be able to fill out their form without getting blood all over the place.  After getting bored in the vendor area, my camping neighorbor Mark and I decided to hit the trails.  The bike he rides is designed for dirt jumping and mine still had the racks for carrying gear on so we made quite the odd pair on the trails.  Right from the start he was having problem in all the uphill sections after having too much fun on the trails the previous day.  We stuck together for a while, but when I realized I would never make the lunch I signed up for in time, we split up.  This was not something I wanted to do because I also was not carrying all the normal things everyone should be carrying on the trails.  All I had was water, a map, and a pump attached to my bike.  He had the tools and patches for flat tires, but wasn't concerned since he was walking his bike much of the time anyway. 

I went tearing off ahead knowing a flat would make for a miserable time.  A mile into my solo portion of this ride I hit a trail intersection that finally let me know where I was at.  We had only covered about half the distance we thought we did when we split up.  The good news was this was one of those trails you just wished would never end.  A nice rhythm of ups and downs with almost nothing that forced a stop.  The amazingly fun and long Ray's trail ended and put me onto the Sidewinder trail that just plunged downhill seemingly the entire way.  Of course what goes down must come back up in the mountain bike world, and the next trail named Osprey took me right back up the same sort of thing I just went down.  The climb was somehow enjoyable with no killer parts just a smooth ramp up into the sky.  I was in a hurry at this point to catch the lunch so I took off down an access road from the top of the climb and made my way to the lunch only a little late.  The lunch of course went on for about two hours which would have left me plenty of time to get back any way I wanted.  I drowned my sorrows in cookies and had a chat about the odd bikes that were around with some random guy.  There was a Surly Big Dummy, Jeff Jones Space Frame ($$$$$$$$$$$$$$), and my bike with racks stood out as well. 

I started reassembling my bike into touring mode before the end of the day.  I was looking forward to getting back on the road with some winds at my back.  There was some fireside beer and chatting for much of the evening.  The winds were kicking up and a few peoples tents were taking off.  I changed my hammock setup to closed up the tarp on the end the wind was coming from.  I was a little worried about all of it because I had set up in very nice weather with no real consideration for high winds.  The wind rocked my hammock back and forth during the night, but that was the worst of it for me.  Next up a short day to start off the ride home.

Lewistown to Raystown Lake

55.4 Miles

This day again started with me in rain gear fearing the worst.  It started off chilly enough to not mind the extra warmth from the raingear, but quickly warmed up and I shed all the layers.  When I got back to Lewistown I ran into my first naviational surprise of the trip.  The highway 22 in Lewistown was upgraded to a multilane expressway because of all the truck traffic.  That's not something I want to have anything to do with so I had to waste some time trying to find an alternate.  Luckily for me a local stopped by and told me that it settled back down into a normal two lane road a mile or two outside of town.  I took a nice little scenic backroad detour to the next little town and everything was good in the world again.  Great weather, good roads, and a short day ahead of me made me all smiles.  I was running out of Amish country and eventually the roads got back to normal from how great they were for most of the trip.

I had my first annoying driver in my trip.  To my surprise it was a commercial driver too.  An oversized load, house on a truck, was coming up from behind me with our road expanding to a much wider two lanes in each direction in a few hundred feet.  I am riding right around the outside line of the lane with a wide but gravel shoulder to my right.  I hear the truck laying on the horn as it approaches telling me it has no intention of waiting a few seconds for more room.  I decided to avoid getting hit by the house and made a quick swing over to the very edge of the shoulder.  I can live with this being the most annoying vehicle on a trip.  The roads had a big change in feel as the day went on from rolling farmlands to somewhat busy highway following a river.  I knew from my planning that the final leg into Raystown Lake was going to involve a pretty substantial climb, so I planned some of my day around this.  I had lunch a bit early to avoid eating just before a big effort, and I let my water supply run low aiming to only carry what I needed up the climb.  Somehow this plan actually worked and I finished the iced tea I picked up in town just at the top of the climb.  Another couple minutes and I pulled into the camping area reserved for mountain bikers for the weekend.

I managed to get my act together enough for a short ride out on the trails.  The trails were more like a rollercoaster instead of the smashing your way through an obstacle course like the trails at home.  I got a little over aggressive and almost took a spill before I got the groove of the trails.  The dirt bumps in the trails can force you to choose between working to keep your bike on the ground or whether to just embrace some time in the air.  I'll have to figure this out more in my full day for riding ahead.