2024 Cross Country Trip: Day 15

Friday, August 23, 2024

It was our last day on the road so we were planning on making it home by the end of the day. We left Fishersville, Virginia and decided to skip Skyline Drive because it would’ve taken too long. So, we just hopped on I-81N. The GPS showed it was going to take about 7 hours to get home and since we left a little later than we anticipated, we decided to just cruise along. The nice thing about I-81 is that it parallels the Shenandoah Mountains for a while so there are nice views.

Eddie and I have never been to Gettysburg, so we were planning on stopping there. As we were leaving to start the day, we found Appalachian Brewing Company and put it into the GPS. We were schedule to be there around noon.

As we got closer towards Gettysburg, we came to Hagerstown, Maryland and got off the I-81 and got on I-70E. We followed that for a little bit until Beaver Creek, MD and took route 66N to 77E through Catoctin National Park. We weren’t expected to be riding through any more mountains so it was a nice little ride.

We continued through the park and onto route 15N, crossing into Pennsylvania, and into Gettysburg. As we got into Gettysburg, there were open fields and a lot of historical signs and statues. It was really neat, especially not knowing where or how the route was taking us. We passed the State of Pennsylvania Monument and decided to take a little ride through there.

We got off the bikes and walked around the one monument and took in the scenery. It was kind of surreal reading some of the plaques and knowing what happened there. There’s definitely a lot of history and I’d like to go back and learn and see more, but we didn’t have time. It was pretty neat though, Eddie found a brass plaque for the 26th Infantry, and saw there was a private, Michael Quinn, which was my father’s name. That was cool to see!

From there we stopped at the Appalachian Brewing Company for lunch. I had a delicious spicy chicken sandwich while Eddie got fish and chips, which also looked really good. We didn’t stay too long because we still had about 4 hours of ride time to go before making it home.

We took route 15N until we reached Harrisburg, PA and got back onto I-81N. Unfortunately it was busy so we hit some traffic. Traffic is never fun on a bike as I’ve mentioned in another post, so we crawled along until we saw what started it. On the other side there was someone that was towing a trailer and the trailer hub caught fire. They were in the highway trying to direct traffic to keep people away from the fire.

The traffic finally cleared up once we passed that incident and we followed the interstate for about 120 miles before reaching I-84E in Scranton, PA. From there we knew we only had about an hour and a half to go. It was the home stretch. We took I-84E until Middletown, NY where we parted ways on route 17.

We finished the day with about 435 miles and each got home around 6:45. It was nice to finally be home and not have to worry about anymore long days of travel. As much fun as these trips are, the highway riding can get boring, especially after a few hundred miles in a day. My butt needed a break from the seat. I think I’m going to upgrade my seat before my next trip! Haha