Day 5

Woke up, rode on. We finally started our ascent into the mountains. Half the day you spend walking up the mountains, the other half you spend resting at the top and riding down the other side. All this time you know that when you get to the bottom, there is another mountain to go up.

We eventually stopped to rest in this small town which was really more of a cross roads. The center of town didn't have any houses, just a traffic signal, a supplies store, grocery store, and a bank. This is also the first place that we saw Amish. The Grocery store even had a section of it's small parking lot with a horse tie up. It was odd to see 2 Amish hanging out at the supply store speaking there pig-dutch language with horse drawn buggy's only 20 feet away from 2 dudes discussing the weather next to their oversize ford pickups. Everyone was very friendly though, and when we set up outside of the bank to rest from the heat and ingest some food, the bank workers were nice and even talked with us briefly.

We tried camping in this one spot, not to far from a house, but were spotted. The owner came out and told us next time just to knock on the door that way we don't startle him. He didn't mind if we slept in his yard, just as long as we didn't light a fire since it had been a dry spring. He gave us a history lesson about the area and how Burnt Cabins PA got it's name from William Penn's men coming to survey the area and make sure whites weren't breaking the treaty with the natives by living there. If whites were caught settling the area the surveyors told them they had a year to leave, and when the next year came if the surveyors found them there again they would burn down the settlers cabins. The was 86 years old and had lived on the property for 30-40 odd years. Now that we had his permission we realized that the spot we chose was terrible because of the pickers on the ground and lumpy soil, so we asked him if we could sleep closer to the house in the soft grass which he obliged. Only the second night I had to set up my tent.