Monday, June 21, 2010

STB's Big Adventure Part Three


















It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them. Thus you remember them as they actually are, while in a motor car only a high hill impresses you, and you have no such accurate remembrance of country you have driven through as you gain by riding a bicycle. - Ernest Hemingway

Boy Howdy!

We stopped in at the Ohiopyle Visitor Center on our second day out and mentioned to the lady we were planning on riding out to Falling Water, the Frank Lloyd Wright designed house 3-1/2 miles away. She said that we didn't want to do that and she tried hooking us up with someone to shuttle us out there. Having no luck with that we headed out with an hour alloted to make our tour date reservation. After one mile of uphill climbing, it became obvious that we would never make it in time at the rate we were going. We cached our loads behind the guard rail and continued on. After cresting the first big hill I was going down about 25mph when the front of the bike started to go into a speed wobble. I tried riding through it but it developed into a full blown tank slapper. I was looking for a soft place to crash but decided just to grab as much brake as I could and see what happened. I got it stopped but the bars never stopped oscillating until the bike came to a dead stop. I checked the speedometer and it got up to 33.3 mph at it's fastest. The pucker factor must have pegged the meter on that one. You couldn't have driven a pencil up my ass with a sledgehammer! Needless to say, I kept the speed down for the remainder of the trip. We did make our reservations with about ten minutes to spare, however.


The house is just magnificent. Wright was a design genius even though some of the details didn't always work quite as designed. His houses are noted for little things like roof leaks and Falling Water had to have some major reconstruction work a few years back. Most everything in the house is original, including art work by Picasso, Diego Rivera, Tiffany and others. We were there on a splendid day as you can tell from the photos. Our guide was very knowledgeable and the trip was well worth the wild bike ride out there.



After our sightseeing we didn't have much time left, so we put in a relatively short day, only 21 miles. With the 62 the day before and the hills on this one, that was plenty.

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