35. Stay in a lockhouse on the C&O Canal

A little history before I explain what I'm planning to do.

The Chesapeake and Ohio Canal (C&O) is a 184.5 mile canal that runs along the Potomac River between Cumberland, MD and Washington, DC. It originally had 74 locks and 11 aqueducts to manage the elevation change between the mountains and Washington, DC where the river meets the Chesapeake, alongside the canal is a towpath, that was used by the horses towing the barges along the river. And to operate the 74 locks, there were lockhouses where the lockkeepers lived so that they could manage the locking system. While the C&O was a revolutionary artery for trade in the region between 1834 and the early 1920s, a flood in 1936 irreparably damaged the decaying canal, and in 1938 it was acquired by the United States and converted into the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal National Historic Park.

Today the C&O is a beloved park for those of us in DC and Maryland since it's a peaceful retreat near the city, a bike path that runs along the river between Georgetown and Maryland, and adjoins several other bike paths and parks, making it a huge pedestrian and cycling greenway. The canal is still there, but the towpath is the real star now. And next to the canal, sit the lockhouses, many of them carefully preserved.

And you can stay in them.

So many times we would bike or walk past the lockhouses and talk about how you could stay in them, and we always wanted to try it, but never got around to making plans to do it. But this Halloween, that is changing. Because I have reserved a lockhouse for two nights, Oct. 30th and 31st and several of us are going to stay and spent the weekend hiking and enjoying the canal.

There are several different lockhouses, all preserved during distinct periods of the canal's history, all the way from the Civil War to the 1930s. Each of the lockhouses has a specific year, and it's preserved in the same state it would have been in during that period. And they're very accurate. In the 1800s there wasn't electricity, running water, and certainly not indoor plumbing, so the lockhouses from that period are in exactly that condition. After some consideration, we decided to choose one of the lockhouses that had electricity, running water, and indoor plumbing. Because there's nothing wrong with being historically accurate to 1916, right?