During most of my bicycle touring of the 335-mile Great Allegheny Passage/C&O Canal path linkup, I have camped at night, mainly at free campsites along the trail, and those arrangements all worked fine for me.
But one afternoon during a solo tour of the GAP/C&O, I booked a berth at a $15-a-night Hancock, MD, bunkhouse. Had I not called ahead to pay for a spot and arrived at dusk after a long hot day on the bike, I would have heeded the pleas of my inner voice to flee.
As it was, I got nary a wink that night, and mostly because my intuition told me that my bunkmates, Jacob and Louie (not their real names), were up to no good. I was concerned that if I fell asleep, some of my gear would disappear.
The bunkhouse, basically a screened-off structure on the side of a chainlink-fenced lot behind a town bicycle shop, was funky and memorable on its own merits.
To the credit of the bunkhouse management, the showers, which were built into converted portapotties, and the portapotty potties themselves, were clean and functional, and came generously stocked with TP and hand sanitizer.
There also was an outdoor sink, which was not hooked up to the garden hose that apparently is used to supply it, when I arrived. The sink drained directly into the soil below. Since no facility manager was on site when I arrived, I wasn’t sure whether the hose water was potable so didn’t drink it.
I found my bunk in the bunkhouse too narrow for my comfort. The 16 beds were stacked into eight wooden, bunkbed-style units. The individual platforms were covered with thin foam camping pads. I flipped the pad and whisked the dust bunnies and clumps of hair off my bunk before unrolling my own sleeping pad on top.
It was too warm to bother with a sleeping bag that night. But I covered myself with my lightweight bag liner and contemplated trying to get to sleep.
Unfortunately, I did not have ear plugs, which could have muffled the din of the passing trains and the staccato blasts of the semi-trailer truck airbrakes on I-70 nearby.
Along with the traffic tunes, some sort of small animals were skittering and peeping either within the walls or across the roof. I searched for the culprits with my headlamp, but never spotted them inside the structure.
It was really my concerns about Jacob and Louie that kept me awake, however.
They had bikes, and Jacob said they had been touring together for a week or so. But the chain-smoking, beer-drinking duo seemed to have no particular destinations in mind. They didn’t seem much like any other cyclists I have met on the road. For one thing, I have never met other serious cyclists who chain-smoked cigarettes.
Jacob was in his late 30s, and Louie appeared to be in his late 20s. Louie, who had long blond hair, told me he planned to ride around the country seeking out music festivals. He was hauling his belongings in a second-hand bike trailer, the kind that suburban dads use to tote their tots on the neighborhood bike path. Jacob, who had short, neatly-trimmed hair, said he had recently acquired a plastic shower curtain to make it more comfortable for him to sleep outside in the rain. He planned to head north. I didn’t ask how either was financing his vagabond adventure, but Jacob told me he was open to seeking employment.
Both expressed an uncomfortable amount of interest in my gear. Louie told a story about a guy who loaned a car to one of his friends, and somebody else had given him his bike, and wasn’t that cool and how the world should operate, with the haves sharing with the have-nots?
It’s possible they were OK, maybe just down on their luck and trying too hard to be friendly and accommodating. If so, my apologies for doubting, and go in peace, brothers. But my inner voice was sounding an alarm, and I kept my wallet and iPhone in the pockets of the pants that I wore to bed. Much of my gear was stacked beside my bed on the bunkhouse’s wooden floor.
Every time I started nodding off, I heard them whispering to each other at the far end of the darkened bunkhouse. Insomniacs? High? Or waiting for me to fall asleep to pounce?
A lone bird started chirping, loudly and continually, at about 4:30 a.m., and I got out of bed and packed quietly. More whispering. “Doug’s leaving,” I heard one of them say.
I had a quick breakfast at the town Hardee’s when it opened at 6 a.m. Then, with a couple of back-to-back days of rain looming in the forecast, I got an early start on my 126-mile, Mountain Dew-fueled ride home.
Lessons relearned: Don’t buy a pig in a poke, and sometimes you get what you pay for.
