A Season of Bikey Adventure

Well, the weather has been pretty warm for this time of year so I have been able to get out a few last times before the switch off of Daylight Savings Time shuts down my bike riding season tomorrow.  With falling back to the "real" time it will be too dark to get in any more rides after work. The last couple of weeks when I hustle home from work and get right out I still end up getting back after dark.  Fortunately I have a nice little 35 lumins light that does a pretty good job. To be able to get in a ride on a weekend requires a combination of decent weather (anything above 50 degrees) and nothing else going on on the weekend to compete with the time during the middle of the day.  So both last  year and probably this year, the Saturday before the time change is usually my last ride of the season.  I don't like to ride in the rain or snow, or when its too cold.  And I don't like to be out much after it gets dark - there are enough car drivers that struggle to see a bike rider when its light, much less when its dark.  So, yeah, my season is most likely over today.

So, this summer, at the beginning, I came up with some things I wanted to accomplish on my bike during the season.  And I am pleased to say I did them all.  Happiness!

I didn't have too may goals, I like to keep it simple. One goal was to ride out to a cemetery I had stumbled upon, out east of town.

There is a bike trail that goes close by so most of the way I did not have to worry about auto traffic, which was nice.  The trail follows an abandon train track.  I knew there were a couple of small hills between towns but it was nice to get out on the trail and see where the train track had actually cut into the hill to even out the climb for the trains.  Works for bikes, too.

I had originally picked this as something I wanted to do because I was looking in BillionGarves and saw that this cemetery was not only not cataloged, but not even listed. As near as I have been able to find, anyway. I suppose it could be there under a different name than I had been looking for. Anyway, it is a small, inactive cemetery so I had thought of riding out there a couple of times and cataloging it. I figured a couple of times would do it.

Alas, I later found that it is listed and pretty much cataloged in Find-A-Grave, the other major cemetery cataloging application. And in there it was listed by the name I had been searching for. Nevertheless, I still wanted to ride out there.  So I did.

One of the other things I like to do is get to a nature reserve here in town.  Its a few miles away but its a real nice place to visit.  Very quiet and peaceful.  And full of trails.

Its not uncommon at all to come upon deer in the reserve.  That's in addition to the various kinds of squirrels I see in the reserve and all over town. I actually almost hit one once, he waited until the very last minute to dart across the trail in front of me.

There's a small lake in the reserve, the trails go around the lake but also off into other parts of the reserve.  Its a nice place to visit.  Some times we'll drive there and walk around, some times I'll go there on my bike.  I got there several times this summer.

Another other goal I had was to get to the sections of the bike trails around the city that I have not yet ridden on.  We actually live a mile or so away from the closest part of the trail, if you don't count the one spur that comes within a couple of blocks of our house.  So every time I ride on the trail system I'm starting from one side and have to go a little ways to get there.  The trail is broken into sections and the sections I hadn't been to were those on the opposite side of town from where I live.  So this summer I wanted to get to them, if only to say I had ridden the whole system.

A fair amount of the trail system goes through wetlands so they build boardwalks in those parts. They make a fun sound as you ride over them.  This section I was on today has the longest stretch of boardwalk of the whole system.

The section I was on today runs along side a small river for much of the way.  Even with most of the leaves down now it was still a very pretty stretch of trail.

I had been talking to a friend who also rides bikes and lives up in that neck of the woods - he was saying its his favorite stretch of the trail system.  Anyway, he told me that this section of trail has more ups and downs than any of the other sections but that it generally is down hill going the one direction so I made sure I was going that direction today when I went on it.  That made it much easier of a ride. And he was right about more hills.  There were a couple.

I stayed on the trail system after finishing the sections I hadn't done before since they were on the way home.  One of them goes right by some wetlands, some river bottoms, I guess you could call them.  No boardwalks, but the trail runs along the side of the same river I had been riding along for quite a ways.

A lot of times along this section I'll see lots of smaller birds, ducks, geese, and even an occasional swan.  Once I saw a great white heron, but nothing today.  I guess they have all left for points south.

Its still a real pretty stretch of bike trail, though.

Our leaf color has pretty much peaked and gone now. Most leaves that are going to fall off the trees have done so already.

Still lots of rusty reds and browns left, though.  Still a pretty ride.

One of the other things I wanted to do this summer was ride more miles than I did last summer.  I wasn't sure I was going to make it, a couple of weeks ago I was still several rides short.  But by getting out as much as I could this week I was able to do it.  That, plus today's ride was a new personal best for distance: 24.2 miles. That was something else I had wanted to do - have a ride that was longer than my longest ride last summer.  I actually had made that earlier in the summer with an 18 mile ride.  So today's ride beat my best by six miles and brought the season's total to 460 miles, which does beat last year's total miles.  Another achievement was only falling off my bike once all summer, down from two times last summer.  And my worst equipment failure this summer was a broken chain which I was able to get repaired quickly enough to still be able to complete the ride I had set out to do that day.   Not a bad bike season for an old guy.