Tails from the Bike: week 2
This weekend, HB and I didn’t go cycling on Saturday.
But on Sunday…
.. whooooooooooooeeeeeeeeeeee! We found a super-cool set of biking trails at a state park near us.
“Gee, Danielle, what makes them ‘super-cool’?” you are wondering, I’m sure.
WELL, they are small paved trails, intended for biking in the spring/summer/fall months and cross-country skiing in the winter. They are surrounded by pines and other greenery. At times, the bike trails were covered with pine needles and smelled really nice as our bikes crushed the needles on the trails.
Occasionally, something else would smell really good… but I could never quite figure out what type of growing plant was associated with the good smell. I always heard lots of birds chirping, and we saw some very pretty ponds (we’d probably call them lakes back in Indiana)…
The trees are starting to change, but just barely.
Also the trails are great for biking, in that
1) Practically no one is on them!
2) The steepness of the hills is just right for exerting myself some of the time and for getting in some good coasting at other times. They are not so steep that when I go uphill I want to stop and walk my bike. Of course, after a couple of hours, even those mild hills can get to me.
3) The curves, while making it tricky, also make it very pretty. There was one glorious yellow tree that I spotted as we rounded a corner.
Tangent for details about lack of people on the trails:
We passed about 4 people the entire day. One of them was a woman with a little terrier in her bike basket. No… it was only semi-reminiscent of The Wizard of Oz, because the basket was open and on the front of the bike, not the back. Plus, the woman was wearing pants, not a big skirt.
Another interesting character was this older gentleman in a flannel shirt who at first glance appeared to be just tooling around casually. But after seeing him at both ends of our trip, we realized he was making some serious mileage.
end of tangent
As much as I liked Concord last week, this was definitely better.
One final detail (out of chronological order), on our way there, I was excited to realize we were in cranberry country! Of course, the bogs/fields don’t look like much – other than really strangely shaped fields. But the funny thing was that we ended up behind this huge truck that was piled full of cranberries.
Who knew they’d use such a huge truck for a cranberry harvest? Well, perhaps it is common knowledge around New England, but not for a Hoosier-girl. In this picture, you can actually see reddish/pink cranberries peaking out at the top of the truck. Another point of interest is that it looked like they’d just come from being harvested using the wet harvest method, because the truck was dripping water the whole way. It was all pretty interesting, especially since I’d never seen such a thing before. It made for a fun way to start our trip.
Here is one last picture from the trip.
