My fabulous hotel offered a generous breakfast and a late check out, so after eating, I took off for a bike ride on the C&O towpath. It was not paved, but the ground was firm and the real heat had not started yet, so it was a joyous morning. I cycled the towpath for an hour and encountered few people and gorgeous scenery.
After a shower, the hotel clerk suggested that I walk up the Great Allegheny Passage to see some of Cumberland’s history. I walked the bridge over the canal toward the original Fort Cumberland, which was Lt. Col. George Washington’s HQ during the French and Indian War. I had not realized that conflict took him as far west as Fort Duquesne (now Pittsburgh). The site was laid out well and made the history accessible. I wandered it, taking in the audio recordings, until a homeless man joined me and made it clear I was trespassing on his area. Given our relative isolation, I moved on to the a monument to the National Road, which commemorates Washington’s idea to build this road west to Ohio and the frontier. You can see the original starting point as you look down from the monument.
I headed back over the canal and tried to find something to eat in the historic downtown, but very little was open. So I wandered its three blocks, peering into the closed sandwich shops and thinking about ice cream. Instead, I headed back down the Great Allegheny path and stopped for lunch at The Crabby Pig, where I had my first Maryland crab cake. Given how far inland I was, that seemed silly. But it was good. At this point, the temperature read at 95 and rising.
From Cumberland, I headed west to Frostburg, the furthest point west in Maryland. There was a carriage museum there at a charming depot stop, but everything was closed due to Covid. I decided that my return journey home would try to follow the C&O Scenic Byway. I stopped in LaVale to see one of the original toll houses on the National Road. By the 1830’s, the federal government decided it needed to charge tolls for the maintenance of the National Road, but determined that was unconstitutional, so they put the road in the control of the states. The first toll booth was at LaVale, and it was a nice little stop in my day.
I meandered on along the back roads with a brochure of the various sites along the C&O. I stopped at the Paw Paw Tunnel, which had been 12 years in the making because it took human labor to dig through the mountains. At this point, I was remote enough that my cell phone coverage had stopped. I continued to follow Maryland Scenic Byway signs, and wound up in West Virginia, so I pulled out my road atlas and found my way along the Potomac back to Maryland in the heat of the day, wondering if my car could tolerate the hills after the fiasco of the previous week. I eventually re-entered Maryland at Hancock and decided that I should probably rejoin I-70, which is also part of the National Road and the Scenic Byway at that point. I continued on it until I turned off again to get out of the holiday traffic and head for Brunswick, and a stop for ice cream there. At this point, my phone registered the temperature above 100 and I congratulated myself for all I had seen along the canal with a milkshake and brief walk in the town before turning toward home again. This was my last overnight stay in Maryland–the rest would be day trips.
