Did you know I’ve spent the last year living in DC? I don’t like it very much, though a lot of that is probably due to circumstances. I’ve dealt with those circumstances by getting into bikepacking, which is when you strap a bunch of camping stuff to your bike and then flee your life, but you get to call it exercise instead of a maladaptive coping strategy. Recently, bikepacking took me to an unexpected place: a randomly Lord of the Rings-themed campground.
In mid-October I biked the Great Allegheny Passage and the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal, a roughly 350-mile trip from Pittsburgh to DC entirely on rail trails and canal tow paths. It was my first long trip, and it was mostly great: astonishing views, nice people, lots of time to totally not panic about the website you’re currently reading. The exhilaration of spending eight days on my bike isn’t something I would have dreamed of before moving to DC, and however else my time here plays out, I’ll always be grateful to the town for introducing me to a cool new hobby.
The trip didn’t start so great, though. I left Pittsburgh in a cold, heavy rain, hoping to make it about 50 miles to a free campsite. Biking in the rain sucks, and I quickly realized it sucks a lot more when sleeping in a tent means there’s no reliable way to get dry again. I pushed forward as my shoes turned to little ice baths and my hands were cold whether I wore my gloves or not. I was briefly bolstered by some folks selling hot dogs outside the small town of Boston, Pennsylvania, who regaled me with how they had loved the route I was on so much that they bought a bed and breakfast to be part of it. Pedalling on, I stopped again in the town of West Newton, when the rain turned the plastic bag of Tums I have to carry around as a 41-year-old man into a technicolor sack of goo. I stood under the awning of a Rite Aid for a while, as people getting into their cars looked at me pityingly and clucked about how long it would be until the weather changed.
I’d passed an intriguing awning made of bike parts while looking for the pharmacy, and an internet search told me it was for the nearby GAP Trail Campground, a “luxury” paid spot that boasted “hobbit showers.” I didn’t know what a “hobbit shower” could be, but its existence made me realize I could spend the next several hours trudging through the rain, or I could spend them basking in a hot shower. After wrestling so long with the idea that changing my plans made me a failure that a stranger remarked on how long I’d been staring into space looking worried, I damply tapped my credit card details into the campground’s website and biked over.
The receipt told me the proprietor would show up that evening, but they never did, and I found myself puttering around a covered patio full of wicker chairs and power outlets as I avoided setting up my tent in the rain. There was a covered area where I could have put up my tent, but I was worried other campers would show up and I’d be in their way. I eventually set up under a tree by the nearby river and headed for the “hobbit showers.”
The showers were gorgeous, with plant-covered walls and plenty of scalding hot water. With no one else waiting for them I lingered for an irresponsibly long time, pep-talking myself that it was OK to struggle and equally OK to decide not to suffer more than I had to. As I dragged my heels on getting out, I noticed a coffee cup sitting on a ledge that read “I love you like a hobbit loves second breakfast.” There you go, I thought. A hobbit shower.
I made dinner (read: poured hot water into a bag of dehydrated food) and stuffed my shoes with some newspaper I’d carted with me from DC after reading the weather forecast. I curled up in my sleeping bag, sighed at the rain galloping across the top of my tent, and decided I’d worry about being wet in the morning.
That morning dawned very cold but miraculously, though only briefly, free of rain. My shoes were full of wet newspaper shreds and no drier than they’d been when I went to sleep, and my gloves felt more wet despite having been hanging up in my tent all night. When I eventually pulled myself from my sleeping bag, I was somehow shocked to find the campground empty, with no other idiots deciding to spend the night outside when there was a town full of indoor accommodations around them.
I shivered around packing my wet possessions into my wet bags, and it was then that I began to notice that the campground’s Lord of the Rings theme extended to more than just a mug in the shower. There was a map of Middle Earth on the bathroom wall. There was a full-size poster of a hobbit hole by the bike wash station. There were posters for The Green Dragon and The Prancing Pony lining the corridor to the showers. There was a sign reading “Speak friend and enter” and another that read “Let us drink like dwarves, smoke like wizards and party like hobbits.” (I imagine that slogan is more enticing when it’s not 8am and freezing and you’re all by yourself.)
The campground felt trippier with each new discovery. Where was I, and where was everyone else? Did The Lord of the Rings have something to do with biking? I guess its characters camp during their adventure? Had I stumbled into the Lord of the Rings fanfic I used to write when I was younger? I rolled these questions around in my head, pausing briefly to blink at a sign for Bucklebury Ferry taken from a Magic: The Gathering card that I’d camped next to but hadn’t seen in the dark.
I sat down on the patio to eat my breakfast (read: granola with dehydrated milk), when my eyes fell on another unusual sight. Hanging near the patio sink was a hair dryer, which I promptly aimed at my shoes and gloves. Unless you’ve also had to put wet shoes on and realize you will simply have to wear them forever, you can’t understand the joy I felt at this discovery. I made some more coffee and settled into the comfy patio chairs, managing to mostly dry my shoes (though not my gloves, which would stay wet for several more days). The campground took on the enchanted quality Lord of the Rings’ best locations evoke, as it transformed the early days of my journey from a grim trek into a magical adventure once again.
I’m a journalist, so it of course occurred to me to find out why the GAP Trail Campground is decked out like this. But so much of the magic of bikepacking is wandering into the unexpected, passing through other people’s lives and worlds. It’s a feeling video games are so good at evoking, and part of the reason I love them too. I find myself loath to ruin the campground’s inexplicability with answers, preferring to leave it a strange little oasis that made my first rough night on the trail a little brighter. There’s a host of other temporary homes I think of fondly from my trip (many of them places where I was able to find copious amounts of food), but the GAP Trail Campground holds a special spot, and it’s given me a new view of both The Lord of the Rings and hair dryers to boot.
