Two-fer!

Lately (for, like, almost a whole week) I have been trying to get out on the local bike paths and cycle some. I want to get in good enough shape to do my cycling on the road. You know, like a big boy.Today brought me to the Bruce Freeman Rail Trail in Chelmsford MA. This former rail road bed runs from Lowell to Westford with Big Plans to have it extend far beyond! Starting at the Cross Point Towers (the former Wang Building) it passes under Rt. 495 past the town ballfields and throughout he center of town where there is easy access to restarants, stores and the public library. Among other attractions in the town center are a bicycle-repair station complete with tools-on-strings and an air pump. This is, by far, the busiest section of the trail with many walkers dog-walkers and cyclists. From the center of town the trail rises gently through the woods.There is a side trail that leads to a parking area at Sunny Meadows Farm. Not terribly useful since it's about half way down the trail. It crosses Male Rd near the Bynam School, Kate's Corner Store and Post Office and the First Baptist Church. Getting off the Trail in this little village and crossing Rt. 27 and heading past Parlay's Farm on Proctor Road opens up the Cranberry Bog, Great Brook Farms to explore. These areas are best suited for mountain or hybrid bicycles. If you forgo the side trip and stay on the Rail Trail you will pass Baptist Pond and travel parallel to RT. 27 to where the trail ends. As cool as this all is, the Bruce Freeman Trail holds a secret.   It turns out that this is two trails in one!

Another task that I have set for myself over the summer is to section-hke the Bay Circuit Trail. I have been concentrating on the portion closest to my house. You have to start somewhere and closer is always better. As you might expect, it is difficult to design a wilderness trail that circus navigates a major East Coast Metropolitan area. Concessions have to be made, and the Lowell-Chelmsfor portion of the trail is one such concession. I'm not even sure where (of IF) the BCT travels through Lowell, but in Chelmsford, it shares the same space as the Bruce Freeman Trail. So, today, as I cruised around on the Tri-Spec I also got to cross off another section of the BCT! Very efficient use of my time and precious calories, if I do say so myself. 

More pavement Makes me Sad

I took the Cross bike up to New Hampshire yesterday morning. Last summer there was promising rail trail that led out of the Windham Depot to Derry that was not un-improved but was un-paved. I thought that this would be an acceptably "cross" bit of a ride given my fitness level and bike riding skill. Errr... No. It was freshly paved and smooth as glass. It was anise ride right into Derry center where it DID turn to dirt (yea) for about three hundred yards (meh) and ended altogether in what look to be an Elderly Housing Complex (boo). I almost crash doug prey good when I came to this sudden stop going up hill in the dirt and couldn't un-clip fast enough but I saved it I wandered around the streets of Derry for a few and zipped back down the Bikeabaun to Windham. I only saw a few other cyclists on the trail. Most of them were friendly except for one dude in particular. He was riding a Specialized MTB and was kind of....large. He was not actually riding when I cam upon him. He was looking at the pond. It was a pretty pond, to be sure and if he had kept looking at the pond but that's not what happened. He saw me coming and tried to mount his trusty steed.  He was kind of wobbly and took up the whole path and that was to be expected as he got underway. After three or four minuets of watching him "get underway" I gave a cheery "on your left" and slid past him at a crawl. That's when I got it: The Evil Eye of the Slow Cyclist. I have given it myself on many an occasion. It's the look of "WTF is that Road Biker doing treating this bike path like it's a TDF sprint stage?" sort of an Evil Eye. The thing is, i was behind his wobbly ass for so long and going so slow that I could have walked pst him, on his left, of course.

First Ride of the Season? Really?

No. I mean, we have a vacation planned FOCUSED on riding bicycles. I love bicycles. I own a shit-ton of them! Sadly, it is true. Yesterday was the first time all year that I had the chance to actually RIDE one of them. In a way, it was good.

I have a new bike. I got it at the end of last year and never really rode it so much. It's a Specialized Tricross (just the base model). Being, as it is, a Cyclocross bike it is theoretically capable of not only riding on the road but on light trails as well. Of course it feels like a road bike, more so than it does a MTB. Having ridden neither in many months my body had no "muscle memory" of what a bike on the road "should" feel like or what a bike on trails "should" feel like so when I went off exploring yesterday, I was able to go on both with he same bike and not get wiggles out about having a "road bike" on the easy trails that I found and explored.

It wasn't a long ride by any stretch of the imagination, but it got my heart rate up and I burned more calories that I would have sitting at home blogging about riding, so I guess it was a "win". I went around Salisbury: the Marsh Trails and some random dirt roads and trails that I found that led down to the river. The one really interesting (and smelly) thing that I did find was a huge pile of clam shells, like a commercial clam-shel dump. Out in the middle of no-where. It was kind of creepy actually.

Hopefully yesterday was the first ride of a re-kindled love affair. Bikes are fun!

Willowdale Death March

I set out to the lovely town of Ipswich MA to tackle the Willowdale State Forest portion of the BCT. Actually, I don't know if Ipswich is lovely or not. I know next to nothing about the town except that it's NOT Gloucester and there are Wolves there. And the "Forest" which I might clarify more as "woods", like most of the State Forests in Eastern Mass. I parked off of Line Brook Road and set off with my new Deuter ACT Trail 32 pack, which I like very much. The bag is definitely large enough to carry a LOT of stuff, including a can of bug spray. Sadly, I didn't put one in and soon was getting eaten alive by a bazillion mosquitos and other similar insects. I turned back. I made it about two or three miles total. It didn't feel like I went very far. I bought bug spray.

I returned the next day and took to the trail, slathered in DEET. I made it past the point where I had to turn back the day before and quite quick thereafter ran out of Forest. The path of the Bay Circuit Trail seems to consistently take a very wide and direct route through wherever it goes. This was no exception. Basically a dirt road running down the middle of the forest. I passed a couple of quaint ponds and had to find my way around a few muddy puddles and a lot of piles of horse poop! I crossed the road at the end and poked around the northern part of Bradley Palmer where the foot bridge over the Ipswich River is. Turning back, I thought that I would try to go a different, more interesting way. There is a fairly large pond running right down the middle of Willowdale. The BCT runs down the western side of the pond. I took the first trail heading east that I could find after getting back into the forest. It would up and around a pretty god hill. The forest was much thicker here and more interesting to look at with old stone walls, fern-covered glades and babbling brooks. I ran into two girls riding their horses out here. I tried to find a Geocache out there but it was too well hidden. Apparently NOT having people find your cache and getting frustrated and pissed of is WAY better than having them find it and having a fun outing. Whatever. Nerds.  It took a lOT longer than I though it would. The BCT portion was only about three miles (I made it  a LOT further under bug-attack the I thought on day-1). Coming back up the east side of the pond made the hike about 7 miles long and the east side is definitely more challenging, although it's "nothing" compared to a mountain hike! As straight as the west trail is, the east trail is winding and has many branches to explore. I would like to get back in there and go through the rest of the forest, or at least the "interesting" side!

Bay Circuit Trail, just keep walking....

Earlier this year my doctor told me that I was fat. Fair enough. I am. She told me to loose weight. OK. I took a walk. A hike actually. I had recently read about an ambitious greenways project here in The Commonwealth called the Bay Circuit Trail. Like any ambitious project there are real and theoretical ideas about it, most importantly to me, where it starts. Theoretically, it starts on Plum Island in Newburyport. As far as I can tell, you have to walk along the roadway for quite some time before getting on a "trail". There are a lot of "proposed" and "temporary" sections up there until you get to the Rowley area, where the trail goes into the woods and stays there until Boxford.

It was an easy jump for me to choose "Section Hiking the Bay Circuit Trail" as a goal for this spring. I did so for numerous reasons including:

• Health and Fitness (loose some of the weight)
• More Outdoor activity
• Train like you fight: I wanted to do more mountain hiking and even some backpacking this fall)

I set out from the doctor's office to the trail that very same day. It hurt but I did several sections of trail over the next two weeks. Each section was about three miles. What I did was park at a trail entrance and hike until the next major road crossing, where I could later park and continue on. My leg and food really hurt doing this, but that was not unexpected as I was recovering from a minor motorcycle crash ( the reason that I went to the doctor to begin with). What I DIDN'T expect was to find out that the reason it hurt so badly was that I was in fact, hiking on a broken leg!!

So I took a couple months off to do physical therapy and let my leg heal up some. 

This week, I decided that I would fill in some of the gaps of trails that I missed on the north-easter portion of the trail before I had to do the portion that is a Road March between Boxford and North Andover.