Peak-ish

 

view from my bathroom window 24 October 2026

Thursday towpath Pete and Ricky to Lumberville 

will I remember how to get to canal in New Hope

Tom's Saturday from MCP ride in 40 degrees

Bordentown

mid-60s by end

Sunday Dave's vertical

Thursday towpath adventure Bulls Island to Riegelsville

Saturday Sergeantsville

Sunday towpath Wash x to New Hope

1 November 2026

Ron M is getting on my case for not having blogged recently. Ron, this one's for you.

I: Another Towpath Thursday

I posted a Thursday towpath ride at the last minute a week ago. Only Rickety and Pete signed up. Usually out front, Pete stayed downwind. He was getting over a cold and didn't want to spray snot on anybody, he explained. 

We started at Washington Crossing on the Jersey side. 

Because it was my ride, I stopped for pictures.

We crossed the river at Lambertville. I'd mapped the route, but I couldn't get a visual on where the towpath was in New Hope. I knew it was some distance from the river, and that, if nothing else, we could ride on the road for a while until the path crossed the road somewhere north of town. My GPS knew the way. The path is a block west of the main drag. 

The Delaware and Lehigh Canal towpath hugs the river sometimes, like here, in Solebury Township.

This is the Bulls Island bridge at Lumberville, PA:

The Lumberville General Store is my second favorite towpath rest stop, behind the Homestead General Store farther north. Both are cozy and have indoor and outdoor seating. While Homestead has the best coffee, Lumberville has the best cookies. They're obviously homemade, but I'm not sure where. They're conveniently already wrapped, which makes for easy stashing in a jersey pocket. I stuffed my pockets and ordered a mocha. We sat outside in the sun.

We walked across the bridge. I remarked that it looked very clean. There were workers at the other end. They had been cleaning, one said when I asked.

Because it was my ride, I stopped for another photo on the bridge north of Stockton.

And again a few minutes later:

This is somewhere south of Lambertville:

When we reached Titusville, we all had our cameras out.

II: To Bordentown

The maples in my neighborhood were slowly changing color. A neighbor's tree to the south was already ahead of the ones in or near my yard. 

This was two days after my towpath ride. I rode to Mercer County Park to meet Tom's ride. On the little bridge over the Assunpink near the East Picnic Area, the lighting was perfect, even if the good colors had passed.

Before we reached the rest stop in the center of Bordentown, Tom led us to the park on the bluff above where the Crosswicks Creek meets the Delaware River. The scene below is of a small marina, I-295, and the river. It makes for a messy photo. I looked up to see a cloud that looked like a feather, so I took a picture of that instead.

III: Dave's Vertical

I had half a mind to bail on Dave's vertical ride out of Skillman Park the next day, but I sucked it up and went. He attracts a wide talent spread. It's a bit intimidating.

One doesn't stop for pictures on Dave's rides. One does wait at intersections and ocassionally have time to snap a photo of branches grown around power lines then cut,

or of vines using the lines as a trellis.

There were 13 of us, so we split up when we got to Lambertville. This being a week before Halloween, the houses were already decorated. Traffic was heavier than usual. It was kind of a mess trying to ride down Union Street. Even if I'd wanted to, I wouldn't have been able to take pictures of the decorations. I would have been run over. One house, with a crowd in front of it, was decked out in a tribute to Dolly Parton.

IV: Adventure in Riegelsville (Another Towpath Thursday)

Once in a while, and not often enough, I find myself on a ride that pokes into unfamiliar territory. When Mike V listed a 40-mile towpath ride from Bulls Island to Riegelsville, PA, I made sure I was well-rested for it.

The NJ side ends two miles north of Frenchtown. Until last Thursday, I'd never done those last two miles. The path is wide and well-maintained, and then ends abruptly at a fence. To the right is a bumpy, deep-gravel road that leads up to Milford-Frenchtown Road. That was the hardest we had to work all day.

From there, we were on pavement, riding past the Superfund site (the buildings are finally gone) at the edge of Milford. We walked across the bridge towards Upper Black Eddy, PA. To the north, the clouds were heavy.

To the south, there was a hint of possible clearing.

There were five of us, and we mucked about on the Upper Black Eddy side because Mike realized that he didn't have PA in his collection of state "welcome to" signs. 

Bobbi was wearing camera glasses that would obey her command, "take a picture." The photos go straight to her phone. She looks at them later. This is one of them, from somewhere after Upper Black Eddy:

Anyone who sticks to the NJ side of the towpath doesn't know how good they have it. The PA side north of Center Bridge (across from Stockton) begins to suck and gets worse. Sometimes all that's there is a rut or two on a grassy berm. Past Upper Black Eddy, that rut is sometimes hard-packed gravel, at which point I am reminded that Fozzie is an aluminum bike.

Anyone with a bar-mounted GPS is used to directional beeps and road name cues. When mine beeped out a right arrow at "stairs," that was a new one on me. We were in Riegelsville. To get to the bridge, we wheeled our bikes on a wooden slat built into a metal stairway leading from the towpath to the road.

We groused about the gravel and the condition of the towpath. "It's even worse north of here," Ken said. I'd gone with him in 2021 on his towpath century up to Easton. He's not lying.

The Riegelsville bridge is famous for having been built by the Roebling steel company of Roebling, NJ. This particular bridge is identical to the Brooklyn Bridge, only much smaller.

The sky to the south had decided to stay cloudy.

Mike's ride description went into some detail about the pizza cafe rest stop in Riegelsville. I'd looked at the menu (no fancy coffee, plenty of meat) and, knowing that if I were to eat pizza on a ride, I'd be having my own pork roll moment, I'd packed an extra energy bar. The ride description had also mentioned possibly stopping at Homestead. Turns out none of us wanted pizza, nor did we wish to plow through more gravel after descending the stairs. So we rode right past the place and found ourselves on a one-way street with the canal on our left and a massively Halloweened house on the right.

Mike had spotted a small foot bridge on our way up. We crossed that to get back to the path.

We could see the Milford Bluffs and the power plant across the river. To our right was a wall of rock. I suddenly remembered that the ill-planned and ill-fated PennEast gas pipeline had been proposed to somehow cross this cliff.

Upper Black Eddy is 7 miles south of Riegelsville. I think this picture from Bobbi was from somewhere close to Upper Black Eddy.

We parked our bikes at the Homestead General Store. I walked back to take pictures of saplings growing in the canal.

They're sycamores. I was Thursday years old when I learned that they could tolerate a certain amount of flooding. This location seemed more than flooding, but there they were.

Inside the store, around the back, is the Homestead Coffee Roasters section. A guy was standing in front of the beans, perplexed. Being a long-time subscriber, I helped him out with the flavor profiles. Look at me, a real coffee snob. He trusted me enough to ask me what I use to grind my beans. "A Barrata Virtuoso," I told him, adding, "I have an Oxo too." That's when Bobbi came up, and they got to talking Oxo burr grinders while I slid off to use the bathroom.

As we sat outside, enjoying the now sunlight, I said, offhandedly, that, since we'd be so close to the Lumberville General Store at the end of the ride, I might pop in to grab some cookies.

"Are they good?"

"Yes!"

Next thing I knew, everyone wanted in on that.

We had 13 miles to go. Somewhere near Tinicum, we came across a house by the river.

On the side were three markings to commemorate flood waters, two of them above the level of the electric meter.

A few minutes later, Mike pointed out a small sign along the road, against the cliff, that marked the high water line of a 1955 flood.

How much water would it take to overflow the river bank far below us, pour over the berm, into the (was it dry then too?) canal ditch, overtop the retaining wall, and rise to the level of that sign?

As Mike described the flood, I tried to take a picture that would show how far above the river we were.

The Delaware is on the center left of this photo, down a steep bank.

I pulled over again north of Lumberville. Now that the sun was out, there were reflections on the water.

Bobbi took a picture of me taking a picture. Note how the towpath is still a pair of ruts.

Ahead of us, everyone else had stopped too.

I rode up to them and took more pictures.

Then they followed me into the Lumberville General Store, where we loaded our pockets with cookies before walking across the bridge to where we'd parked our cars. 

I'm a terrible influence.

Fozzie wanted to take home a souvenir leaf.

I'm used to 30-mile towpath rides. Somehow, the extra ten miles made my legs tired. The trip was well worth the soreness. I told Mike we should do this again a year from now.

V: Post-Peak Peeping

I'd put into Saturday's ride description that we might be stopping for pictures. That warded off most of the impatient people. But it wasn't me who called for a picture stop at the top of Linvale Road; it was Pete.

There were plenty of other places I would have stopped for, but it would have been excessive. There was a carved pumpkin on the stone cemetary wall across from the church at the top of Dutch Lane. Rosemont-Ringoes Road anywhere from John Ringo Road to Sandbrook Headquarters Road would have made for an expansively pretty photograph. Rittenhouse Road heading south from Sergeantsville would have been another. The cow pasture there, full of cow pies but no cows, not so much.

People were well-behaved until we reached the edge of Pennington. One of our riders got a cramp on Woosamonsa; two didn't even bother to wait to regroup at Burd. We found one of the escapees at the next intersection. But the other guy, gone. Not my problem. 

Brian W noted that the best color of the day was along the edge of the soccer field at Twin Pines. I followed him over to take pictures.

VI: Once More on the Towpath

When I bought Fozzie in 2021, I'd figured I'd use the bike only in the winter and maybe get 100 miles in a given year.

Yeah, not so much. This year, Fozzie and I are closing in on 500 miles together. Today's towpath ride got us 30 miles closer.

I snapped a picture in the Washington Crossing, NJ, parking lot.

We went south from there.

We walked across the Calhoun Street Bridge.

There was too much sun glare to the south, so I only took pictures facing north.

This is looking back at Trenton:

The barriers on the towpath at New Hope that had made getting around them a labyrinthine nightmare, are finally gone, which is to say, shoved aside.

Our rest stop was in New Hope. The town was bustling, as were the towpaths. Perhaps everyone was rested from the extra hour of sleep and wanted to soak up what's left of daylight now that sunset is before 5:00 p.m. 

Back at Washington Crossing, I complimented a pretty bike that a woman was loading onto her car. She said the front derailleur must be bent, because the chain was lodged between the crank and the frame. Heddy called Ron over, and Chris came over, and, well, how many Free Wheelers does it take to un-suck a chain?

How many ya got?