Day 65

40 miles

A frustrating day at times as our progress was incredibly slow. This was partly due to hills and partly due to our inability to stop talking! The fact is that when we meet nice people we want to chat to them. As I have said many times, the people have been the highlight of this trip for me.

We entered Nanty Glo after riding the short distance from Vitondale. Here we went to the Liberty cafe. This is not just a cafe. It has photos and stories of the servicemen and women from the area as well as information about the coal mining legacy of the town . The walls are covered with pictures and other memorabilia. This will all be relocated to a museum nearby once building work is complete. 

We talked to Aleashia and Doc who are the General Manager and President respectively of the historical society. Doc is an ex-Navy / Marines medic and a very nice man. We were in the cafe talking for about 2 hours and it flew by. 

Our forward progress was further limited by the map I’m using and the difficulty spotting routes. The lovely people in the Liberty cafe gave us some great directions to get us into and out of Ebensburg and off we went. We carried on to Altoona where we decided to call it a day. It’s been hilly and quite frankly we smell funny. We need to stay in a cheap motel so that we can wash our clothes. 

It’s 1730 now and we are just about at the motel with a brief delay to buy some food.  I will be sitting down with the rotten map and my phone to look at route planning and then a nice early night I think.