Home from Maine 2022 Day 12 - Belvidere, NJ to Montgomeryville, PA

We are at the Rodeway Inn, in Montgomeryville, PA.
 

This is the only place with a room available on Saturday night, that is not over $400. My original plan was to stay in New Hope, but that turned out to be impossible on a Saturday.

While Max complains about me constantly going on about old buildings, it sinks in. He picked up on the dubious elements of the restoration someone did to the Belvidere Hotel where we stayed last night.

What is wrong with this picture? Vinyl siding. I was on the Howard County Historic Preservation Commission for seven years. I am so glad there is no plaque celebrating a restoration in HoCo that says "Historic Preservation Commission" mounted on a patch of vinyl siding. The whole hotel is covered with vinyl siding.

The porch railings are also vinyl. The porch floor is modern concrete pavers. The windows are modern replacement windows with muntin inserts between the panes. 

Max picked up on the inappropriateness and bad appearance of all the vinyl.

In defense of the Belvidere Hotel, Belvidere is a pretty small place, and it may well not be economically viable to restore this great big underused hotel properly. The hotel is probably not economically viable as it is. It's run by a really nice retired guy who is probably in his 80s. He's trying to sell it, and I hope he finds a good buyer.

We crossed the Delaware at Easton.

Easton is a really beautiful town. It was a nice welcome back to Pennsylvania.

There is good bike shop two blocks from the bridge. We stocked up on CO2 cartridges and inner tubes, and Max got a water bottle to replace the one he left at a restaurant a few days ago.

Since our finish town was in Montgomeryville, and no longer on the Delaware River, Max reworked our route to take advantage of a couple lengthy stretches of bike trail. We did about 8 miles of the D&L trail from Easton to Freetown, just before Bethlehem. the D&L was mostly canal towpath, and a bit of rail trail where the railroad once ran along the canal.

This trail is mostly crushed stone in great shape. However, there is this stretch about a mile of single track.

It was much easier to ride than it looked.

After the D&L, we did about 10 miles of the Saucon/Upper Bucks trail, starting in Hellerton. We had lunch at the Hellerton Crossroads Hotel, which is not a hotel and which had painfully slow service. 

These bike trails are a long easy climb out of the Lehigh Valley. They are very rideable crushed stone. This turned out to be an excellent route.

We got in pretty late as a result of the slow service at lunch, and because of a flat tire I got about 5 miles from the end. I botched the job of fixing the flat. Twice. I hate valve stem inserts. I ended up using 3 of the 4 CO2 cartridges I bought earlier in the day.

It was so late that we had dinner before checking in here at the Rodeway, at Michael's Family Restaurant.

Check it out! Max is eating a hamburger! There is a limit to how many times he can have pizza, it seems.

Here is the Strava track.