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. |
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