Pittsburgh, PA-> Cadiz, OH

1. morning hills+bike path delirium
2. flats
3. OHIO!

1. Of course Pittsburgh is surrounded by hills. The very first part of the day started out nice rolling through town and along the river.  Soon enough, we found the hills; two long climbs totalling about 1000 feet upwards.   It was really early, I didn't really have a lot of breakfast, and I was probably a little dehydrated.  The combination of these made things a little weird towards the top.  We finally got to the bike path and had about 30 miles on a combination of two trails.  The biggest problem was it was packed gravel, so we maybe hit a 12 mph average because anything faster was too difficult.  I took off on my own for a bit hoping to get into a grove, but mostly I just had to stop and pee a lot, then I was hungry.   The last hour into lunch was pretty hard because all I could do was think about how hungry I was.  I rode with Jake into lunch which was better to have someone to talk to kill time. 

2. The other day, I woke up to a flat tire, I changed it, but got another one later in the day. When I checked them later in the night to patch the holes, I could only find a little baby hole in one of them. Today after lunch, I went to leave and my tire was mostly flat again.  I changed it again(using the last tube in my backpack).  When I got about halfway to Cadiz, my tire was flat again.  I didn't have a tube, and I knew my pump sucked.  I bummed a tube off Steve, and borrowed Sam's pump and told them to take off and I would catch up.  Turns out Sam's pump was rude(didn't work) so I went to use mine thinking it would be good enough to last the rest of the day.  As soon as I was almost inflated, the valve snapped off the tube making the whole thing useless.  So there I sat atop the hill with no tube or pump, and the next group was at least 30 minutes behind me.  There wasn't anywhere to lay that wouldn't have got me covered in ticks, so I turned on some tunes(Relient K new album of course) and waited.  I checked out the inside of my tire while I was waiting, and found a little piece of metal, hopefully that will solve my problem.   The next group came finally and I got everything fixed to finish the day.

3.  I've been pretty jazzed all trip to get to Ohio, so I was looking forward to it all day.   As soon as we hit the bridge over the river, we stopped to get the first O-H-I-O picture.  Ohio has treated me well so far, a little less hilly than PA, and the sky is totally a better shade of blue.  Per the recent standard, the last 10 miles seemed all hills. Coming into Cadiz was a bit rough.  From a distance, we could see a church on a hill and hoped that it wasn't the one we were staying at.  OF course it was, so getting into town was pretty much all uphill.   I'm pretty jazzed to get to a more familiar  part of Ohio tomorrow, and even more excited to finally get to the flats in the next 2 days.