Loved biking on the Schuylkill River and Chester Valley trails. The hills that followed? They never seemed to end.
How in the world did we (Komoot? Ride with GPS?) pick this metric century route to Gap, Pa., a small town in Lancaster County?
Continue reading “Day 1 of biking from Philadelphia to DC: trails (yay) and hills (too many)”One article about a small section of trail in Virginia leads to the discovery of Virginia’s awesome plans for long-distance bike routes.
One article in my Google Alerts, about a two-mile section of a Virginia trail called the Seaboard Coastline Trail, sends me down a rabbit hole.
It’s a trail I hadn’t heard of, in a town called Suffolk, in a part of Virginia I’ve never visited, so of course I want to know where it is and whether it’s part of the East Coast Greenway‘s coastal route (I think so, because another part of the trail is). To boot, this year’s week-long fundraising ride for the East Coast Greenway is mostly in Virginia.
But it gets better. Another article says the trail will eventually be 11.5 miles long and part of something bigger called the South Hampton Roads Trail, eventually a 41-mile trail between Suffolk and Virginia Beach. This same page from the regional planning commission describes two other trails that will go through the area, including one called the Beaches to Bluegrass Trail (B2B) that will traverse the entire state. And it’s supposed to be more than 400 miles long, though not necessarily all trail. It’s seen as one of six trunkline trails in Virginia (the East Coast Greenway is another).
The conceptual plan for that one was finalized late last year. Now I know these things take an awfully long time before they become reality. But linking trails makes each one more powerful — and would get someone like me to spend more time exploring the state on a bike (and boosting small-town economies.) I’ll be watching for updates and one day planning my ride.
Exploring by bicycle 