Virginia has some catching up to do.
Oh, there’s the wonderful Mount Vernon Trail that we took for the first quarter of the ride or so and that gets packed on weekends. And there are wide sidepaths that you wouldn’t expect to find along some busy roads in the middle of suburban sprawl.
(That’s part of the sprawl, not the sidepaths)
But there are other places that are just awful. One road we needed to cross only had pedestrian cross buttons on the side we needed to get to. In another spot, we walked our bikes through one construction site rather than take the road. (I think they were both widening the road and adding a sidepath that will become part of the East Coast Greenway route, so there’s at least that.) I’m not talking about some of the other nasty bits, and governments haven’t yet installed East Coast Greenway signs.
Yes, our bikes turned into a mess. Our wheels picked up the red clay soil, which was then blocked by our brakes. Our wheel rims were a mess. We cleaned them off as best we could with road trash and poked at the mud clumps with sticks.
One rider tried this:
And this:
The rain didn’t clean off everything, so the Comfort Inn in Dumfries brought out a hose for us:
My cycle computer says 313 miles so far, with another 30 or so to go.
Exploring by bicycle 