I am sitting at a picnic table outside Carol's Grocery and Deli in the barely-a-town of Tunnel Hill, PA. It's a gorgeous day and several nice people have come up and chatted with me, full of curiosity and admiration. Sadly, these things have done very little to offset the foul mood I find myself in this morning.

The trouble all started yesterday evening when I rode through Altoona, PA after a completely unremarkable day sitting in a public library updating my website and returning email. The main drag of Altoona is one of those really long heavily commercial roads lined with auto dealerships and fast food chains, and no appreciable shoulder to bike on. This road is also not particularly well-paved—probably not bad enough to notice if you're in a car, especially considering most of the potholes, cracks, and chunks of displaced pavement seemed to occur right on the white line I was biking along.

Next thing I know, this road is feeding me onto the on-ramp of a highway: NOT COOL. So, I bike back down the on-ramp going the wrong way, can't get onto the road going the other way because there's a concrete median and a whole lot of traffic I'd have to get across, and I'm certainly not about to bike down this shoulder-less road against traffic, so I go with the only remaining option: to bike over the grassy knoll in front of a Hampton Inn, cross a smaller, less busy road with a smaller divider, and make it into a mall parking lot where I can at least collect my wits and check the GPS for an alternate route.

"I need to get out of Altoona by sundown," I thought to myself. I thought this would make a great premise for a country song, so as I rode around the mall parking lot looking for the first of a sequence of side roads to escape this mess I started thinking up a plotline: a housewife is seduced by a charming traveling salesman. The husband finds out, flies into a jealous rage, grabs his shotgun and storms out to find him. The housewife calls the salesman and warns him to leave Altoona. "Or he'll ruin ya." OK, so Altoona is hard to rhyme things with.

Well, eventually I did make it to the lovely and peaceful Sugar Run Road heading out of town, but it was starting to get dark and for some reason I couldn't seem to go very fast. I couldn't tell if the hills were steeper than they look, or the air in my tires was low, or both. Finally I stopped to pump up the tires, which helped somewhat, but the hills were still pretty tough. And by then I was out in the woods, hadn't seen a house for miles, it was getting VERY dark and VERY cold, and I needed to find somewhere to camp. I started feeling desperate.

I finally found, in the fading light, a dirt truck road off the main road that led into. . . I'm not sure exactly. I had seen a few signs to indicate that this was Pennsylvania public hunting land, so I assumed it was fair game (no pun intended) for camping too. In any case, it was just too late and too dark to look for anything else, so I got to work setting up my tent.

But I was really not comfortable with the whole situation. I had no idea if I was allowed to be there, and everything gets scary at night when you're alone. I couldn't help imagining all manner of deranged midnight hunters, drunken frat boys, serial murderers, and rabid animals prowling around the territory. So I did what any rational human being would do: I called my mom.

She reassured me that it's only hunting season for geese, you only hunt geese near a lake and not at night, and pepper spray will work on wild animals too. That did make me feel better. . . until I discovered, upon hearing a terrifying rumbling noise, that I'd camped about a quarter mile from a railroad. Due to some acoustic anomaly of the valley I was in, it sounded like someone was driving a four-wheeler right past my tent every time a train passed through.

Suffice it to say I got a terrible night's sleep. This was the first major "Why the heck am I doing this?" moment I've had on this trip. But at one point as I was lying awake, unable to sleep, and feeling very alone, I looked at my email and there was a message from Barry and Judy who I'd stayed with back on DeRuyter Lake. They said, "Just so you don't ever feel alone, we wanted to let you know we check your website every night. We think of you often. Hugs and kisses, and the best always."

The power of kind words is truly incredible—these ones brought tears to my eyes. And, finally, I slept.