Gettysburg Weekend Part Four

 

Lake Marburg, Codorus State Park, PA

5 November 2021

I had my Moderna Covid booster yesterday, and it's knocked me on my keister. I'm taking a sick day because I have a fever and every time I stand up I want to throw up. It's all good: the vaccine is doing its thing.

While I wait for emergencies to be piped in from work, I'm catching up on my blogging. 

Two weekends ago, Tom, Plain Jim, TEW, JackH, Dorothy, and I took part in the Philadelphia Bike Club's Fall Foliage Weekend. By "took part in," I mean we stayed at the same hotel. We participated in zero of the planned events, not least because I could see nearly everyone's nose and mouth in the hotel, and that gave me the heebie-jeebies. 

Tom has come to Gettysburg for this event a handful of times, so he knows the roads. The route he planned for Sunday morning would be short so that we could come back, get showered, and hit the road around noon.

The temperature was in the high 40s and the sky overcast. The first few miles were through hilly neighborhoods, and then we got to the lake:

My toes were cold. I had a pair of toe warmers in my bag, left over from last winter. I put them in. They worked.

On our way back, we went around the eastern side of the lake, and in the space of two miles, we crossed railroad tracks seven times. Four of those were in Valley Junction. Three were in the town of Porters Sideling.

I looked at a map later. In Porters Sideling, rail line from the north splits into a southwest and southeast branch, with two sets of connecting tracks in between. On a map it looks a little like the Eiffel Tower. In Valley Junction, we crossed the southeast branch four times. In Porters Sideling, we crossed the western corner of the tower, three sets of tracks in a tenth of a mile. Then we followed the western branch for a while.

We knew we were close to the hotel again when we passed the Hanover Frozen Soft Pretzel Facility.

The trip organizers left two hotel rooms open for people to take showers, which we did. On our way home, Tom and I stopped in Little Oxford again to buy brownies from Deja Brew.

Several days ago, a post-event survey appeared in my email. I wrote a small essay about pandemic precautions. 

Now that I've had two weeks to think about it, and well aware that I'm under the fog of a fever, my opinion hasn't changed much. Unless and until the case rate drops to nearly nothing, which it isn't going to do because people are assholes, I'd go back for the roads, but not the event.