Pedal and Path: Across the Continent Awheel and AfootThayer, George B. (George Burton)
History
Pedal and Path: Across the Continent Awheel and Afoot
Thayer, George B. (George Burton)
Bicycle touring; United States -- Description and travel
The "pike" from Columbus to Indianapolis is a road that originally
must have been built at great expense, for it is raised fifteen feet
or more along some of the low lands, and now is kept in excellent
repair,--a broad, level, and very straight highway, so straight that
in forty-four miles there are only two slight bends in it, and so
level in places that for twelve miles there is not the slightest rise
or depression. In the western part of Ohio the land is just rolling
enough to make some very fine coasting, and at times you can look
straight ahead eight or ten miles, to the top of an apparently very
high hill where the telegraph poles seem to come together, they are
so far off, and the task of climbing that hill makes you faint in
anticipation, but long before you get there the hill has faded away
(another illustration of the maxim never to climb a hill until you
get to it), the grade up it has been so gradual, and then, at last,
you can look back and see another hill just as high that you have
come down without knowing it. The very numerous toll-gate keepers
along this pike charge two cents a mile for a horse, so if I had had
one of flesh and blood, the expense one day would have been $1.52,
but it being of steel and rubber, and only part of a rubber tire on
the little wheel at that, the cost for toll was nothing. The road
from Buffalo to Cleveland I thought was high water-mark, but this
pike is so uniformly good for 180 miles that it must have first place.
The appetite such a journey as this gives one is no small part of
the pleasure of the trip, everything tastes so good. The truth was
never more plainly stated than by a Spartan waiter. Dionysius was
taking a "hasty plate of soup," at one of those free lunches they
gave there in Greece so often, when, pushing back from the table, he
complained that the black broth was not highly seasoned enough for
him. The waiter roared it through the hall "Seasoned! We season it
by running, sweating, and getting tired, hungry, and thirsty." It is
truly wonderful how such exercise does increase a person's digestive
ability. I can imagine to a certain degree just how Milo, a Grecian
athlete, must have enjoyed himself. Twenty pounds was the amount of
his daily bread, and the same quantity of meat, besides fifteen quarts
of wine, taken afterwards, no doubt, for his stomach's ache. One
day, feeling somewhat faint from lack of nourishment, he knocked a
four-year-old in the head with his fist, and devoured the whole "beef
critter" during the day. To some this may at first appear incredible,
but there is one explanation, at least, that is plausible: Milo must
undoubtedly have been a wheelman.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Pedal and Path: Across the Continent Awheel and Afoot — John Shaqi
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