this is a wiki-account of some research and planning leading up to a bike trip fom nyc to pittsburgh in august 07 for the annual bikebike conference of community bike projects.

first off, i may take the china town bus from nyc to philly cuz they allow bikes for free (duh!... seems normal, eh?  fuck off greyhound), AND getting out of NYC thru jersey into the PA countryside on a bike seems darn near impossible if not incredibly intimidating.

fastforwarding (or backtracking?) a bit...

this trail can get me from the Cumberland, MD/Meyersdale, PA area to pittsburgh free of cars.

but how to get from philly to cumberland?

this is a link to the google maps 'avoid highways' version of philly --> cumberland

now, i want to use bikely.com to create my route, so i can share it with other people in the bikely community and (importantly!) get an elevation map.  i could retrace the whole route pointby point, but it would be a hell of a lot easier to import a gpx file of the route int bikely.  a quick google search gave me this link - where someone has created a hack to do just that.  but i havent tested it yet.

wow.  it worked!  check it out. bikely rocks.  but this mashup was really cool.  i may take a closer look and tweek it and need to figure out rough daily distances and some possible cheap camping opportunities.   heres what Ken Kifer has to say about camping in the wild while on a bike trip. (fyi - i just read that Ken was tragically killed by a drunk driver)

erok, from freeride in pbg let me know about the PA bike routes, which are detailed here on the PennDOT website.

i could take this route and then hook up with the railtrail path just north of cumberland.

once i take the chinatown bus with my packed bike from nYC to philly, i will need to make my way up to valley forge park and hook up with the above route

the schuykill river trail will help.  from chinatown, i head up to the art museum, jump on the bike path along kelly drive, which with a coupl on-street sections will take me the whole way to valley forge.