Well, I should write up some summary of yesterday's 34- 41- 39-mile walk, which ended up happening on three hours' sleep and taking three or four hours less than I thought it would.
The appointed meeting place was Forbes and Murray in Squirrel Hill, since Evan, Chris, and William were all coming from there, at 7:30, but that's a tough target to hit when you go to bed a bit after 3 a.m. I managed to be reasonably conscious by 6:55, then threw my stuff together and ran to campus to print out maps. Then a 20-minute walk to Squirrel Hill in the cold rain, which turned out to not be so bad once my legs got going and warmed up a bit. Actual starting time was almost exactly 8:00, when we headed north on Murray bound for Highland Park. I'd never actually been into the park before, just by it on Negley and the zoo road on the way to the Highland Park Bridge. It seems to be a fairly substantial place, though the extent of any hiking trails wasn't well reckoned — we mostly walked around one of the city reservoirs, which comes complete with ironic signs saying "This is your drinking water; please keep it clean." Ironic because the first thing we saw when we looked down into the water was two ducks nibbling at the scum that had collected in the corner of the reservoir. On the far side of the fake pond, Chris and William diverged for the trip back home; Evan and I started poking around for a way to get down to Washington Blvd. so we could cross the 62nd Street Bridge.
On the far side was Etna — "Welcome to the suburbs" — which seemed to be the usual sort of dingy industrial place you get these days now that the industry's gone; after that was Shaler, which was more of the same. Pittsburgh's topography has this trick of making you think you're in some crumbling small town miles and miles out in the country when you're really only a few miles from downtown, I guess because everything city-like is hidden by the hills. In the northern part of Shaler we got into a more "normal" (more expected, I guess I mean) kind of residential district, with schools and churches and quiet streets and teenagers out playing basketball. Through there, and into Hampton (I think that was the name) and McCandless, was where we had the least amount of traffic to deal with, so Evan and I were mostly walking side by side on little 25-m.p.h. neighborhood roads, which was really enjoyable. Eventually that switched to larger country roads ("35-m.p.h. state routes," I like to call them) with new housing developments, and that dumped us into a mid-sized shopping plaza on Duncan Road where we found a grocery store.
Evan, surveying the view from the parking lot, said it was interesting because there was really nothing in the scenery, building architecture, etc. that would indicate to him that he was in Pittsburgh (instead of Boston or California, for example) if he didn't already know. I kind of felt like the pine trees would provide some information, and either directly seeing Pennsylvania license plates on the backs of the cars (or at least no plates on the front) would provide the rest. Aside from that, though, he was pretty much right, which is an interesting thought. The grocery store was really our first stop, except for Highland Park, and even that was a quick one: after maybe 10 minutes (and having covered at least 14 miles in five hours), at 1:00 we were on our way again.
After a collection of large-ish roads, we arrived at North Park (roughly 16 or 17 miles out) and had another halt so I could eat a sandwich I'd brought with me. Then we wandered up to North Park Lake, which Evan saw on the map from his N770 little pocket mini-computer thing and proposed we walk around. It was only after a bit of time that it became more clear that the lake was actually a horseshoe shape and that we were able to confirm Keith's indication from Friday night that North Park is mostly picnic shelters. More than three miles around the lake it was, and it was pretty much picnic shelters and small playgrounds set back against the road the entire way. At roughly the 20-mile mark, we came out of the park again and plunged south on Kummer Road. It was around this point that I started slowing down: it seemed from our two West Virginia walks that the big slump occurs somewhere around 25, and that was with a 30- or 45-minute lunch break. I put my condition on "watch" status, and we reviewed the possibilities for bus routes. Our new route out of the park led us through LaRoche College, a tiny campus (if it even qualifies as one) marked mostly by one large towered building and a row of old-style houses looking like they'd been transplanted from Main Street in a small town.
At 4:45 we were at the grocery store again, having covered what we thought was 26 or 27 miles and having another 13.4 to go back to campus. Evan wanted to be in Wean for ITR games at 10:00, which didn't seem out of the question at our previous pace, but I didn't think there was any way I was still keeping up a three-mile-an-hour pace. Somehow, though, either our luck held or we ended up on the good side of some fuzzy math: every time we checked, we were still on target to do the 13 miles in five hours or less again. We had a five-minute stop on someone's unoccupied front porch in Etna, and I sat down for about 30 seconds in the bus shelter at Center and Negley, but that was it. Evan and I parted ways around 9:10 or 9:15 at Ellsworth and Morewood, him to go on to the Craig Street Subway for dinner and me to hobble home as best I could. Without Evan's pacing, it felt like it was taking me forever, but at 9:30 I hobbled up the steps to my own front door.
This morning — after sleeping for two hours, another one, and then a final eight and a half — I manually plotted our route through the new Google Maps distance measurement tool (which I really think is inferior to the one at Gmaps Pedometer, especially because it didn't even save the route) and found we'd made a math error in calculating the total distance of the trip. It was 17 to the lake, we figured, plus three around it, and then the 20 miles back again, plus probably an extra mile on the way out for wandering in Highland Park. Throw in the mile from my house to Squirrel Hill in the morning, and I was all set to say that I walked a new record of 42 miles in a day. Ah, but you see, we only walked around the lake once, so we shouldn't have added its distance into the "20 miles back" part. Google confirms: even with Squirrel Hill and Highland Park included, the total distance was only 39 miles. Still, 38 miles of that in 13½ hours, which is definitely something new.
So... West Virginia in June, anyone?
