Tag: East Coast Greenway

Day 3: 72 miles from Jekyll Island to St. Mary’s, Georgia

The day’s highlights: a rail trail and a “submarine”.

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Today’s highlights: the Georgia Coast Trail in Woodbine, the “submarine” outside a military base and tagging along with Brent for his talk about the East Coast Greenway to about three dozen people at a meeting of a military officers association in St. Mary’s. Only a few of them may want to get on their bikes, but they certainly could appreciate the dollars from filling around 30 rooms at a locally owned, non-chain motel.

Once again, worries about the weather were unfounded. No rain. We finally got the sun and heat we were expecting (while there’s snow in the forecast at home — glad to be missing that!)

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Day 2: 54 miles from Hinesville to Darien, Georgia, plus 14 miles around Jekyll Island

No rain .. yay! Today topped expectations in many ways.

4467D632-D9F9-421E-8E22-20F22DD78B28The word of the day is lollygagging.

Lollygagging while writing the day’s blog entry, of course. But also lollygagging a bit during the 54 miles we rode during the morning.

Lollygagging, as the Brit learned this morning, is a southern way of saying dawdling. Can I explain that five ways to Sunday?

Today’s biking exceeded expectations. The rain we were expecting to wake up to never materialized. The stretch of Highway 17 turned out to be pretty harmless. And we had a vehicle keeping traffic off our backs while we backtracked a bit from our hotel in Hinesville to get back on the East Coast Greenway

Continue reading “Day 2: 54 miles from Hinesville to Darien, Georgia, plus 14 miles around Jekyll Island”

Day 1: 46 miles from Savannah to Hinesville, Georgia

Where’s that southern heat? And here’s the scoop on alligator meat.

868732AE-71FF-4999-8DF7-D0E28B806485Take a look at how we’re all dressed in this year’s group photo, taken mid-morning in Savannah: long sleeves all around, and even some tights. So much for the warm southern weather we’d been expecting!

And given that it’s Veterans Day, we took time to call out the four vets in our group:

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Day 0: Exploring Savannah ahead of a weeklong bike ride

The annual Week-A-Year bike ride along the East Coast Greenway starts Sunday. Some of us couldn’t wait.

3A30EF1C-CF41-407C-9CF8-47A2336F5B7DAnother adventure on the East Coast Greenway begins Sunday. About 40 of us will spend the week biking from Savannah to Titusville, Florida. But some of us couldn’t wait, so we rode through Savannah and out to the giant Bonaventure Cemetery, of “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” fame.

My fellow riders seemed more intent on finding the grave of Johnny Mercer, founder  of Capitol Records. He’s also the great-grandson of Hugh Mercer, a Confederate general who in turn was the grandson of the General Hugh Mercer killed at the Battle of Princeton during the Revolution. Somehow New Jersey is never far away!

I do love learning bits of history on bike rides, and there’s  more Revolutionary War history in Savannah. The Siege of Savannah in 1779   is a mystery to me, something not taught in U.S. History classes. I learned of the contribution of Haitians and the death of Count Pulaski (remembered through New Jersey’s Pulaski Skyway).

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Biking another segment of the East Coast Greenway, this time in Georgia and Florida

I’m heading out soon on a bike ride that is another installment of thhe East Coast Greenway Alliance’s Week-A-Year ride on track to reach Key West in 2019.

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Looking for No. 6

In a couple of weeks, we’ll be pedaling out of Savannah, Georgia, headed south for around 300 miles on our bicyles. We’ll follow the East Coast Greenway for six days, to the trail town of Titusville, Florida, near Cape Canaveral, where we will play on the seventh day.

Once again, our route will be a mix of trails away from traffic (sometimes lined with Spanish moss), quiet roads, roads with bike lanes or shoulders — and some not-great stuff, like more of U.S. 17, our nemesis last year. That’s the reality of creating a 3,000-mile route down the East Coast that goes through cities, rather than opting for the middle of nowhere to avoid anything difficult.

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Connecticut’s Farmington Canal Trail: One last major gap

There’s been big progress on Connecticut’s Farmington trail since I biked it in 2016.

farmington canal signI’ve been touting Connecticut’s Farmington Canal Heritage Trail, which bifurcates the states as it heads north from New Haven and ends in Massachusetts, as a 5-star trail ever since I biked it in 2016.

Now it’s even better because all the construction projects I saw two years ago have been completed. Only one sizeable gap remains — the 5-mile “Plainville Gap” up to Southington. While the state has approved funding for the project, the gap likely won’t be closed until at least 2023. You can cope by using roads and sidewalks, but of course that’s not quite the same thing.

This gives a sense of just how popular parts of the Farmington trail are.

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Philadelphia’s Pennypack Trail: A surprisingly hilly bike ride

The Pennypack winds and climbs (if just briefly) alongside Pennypack Creek.

I think these ducks associate the human voice with food…

Trails have a reputation for being flat and, to some people, kind of boring. That’s because many were once railroad lines, and locomotives aren’t going to pull a train up a steep hill or around a sharp curve.

Philadelphia’s Pennypack Trail breaks that mold. It winds and climbs (if only briefly) along the Pennypack Creek, offering riders shade and water views.

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A shakedown ride on the D&L Trail from Morrisville to Bristol, Pennsylvania

We head to a section of the Delaware & Lehigh Trail to test out our new equipment ahead of a five-day trip to Vermont and Canada.

We’re planning a five-day ride in Vermont and Canada. The route is picked out, the hotels booked — yes, this is credit-card touring. But there’s no support crew … no one to haul our bags from place to place. And I want to bring my carbon-fiber road bike, which can’t handle a rack and panniers. What to do?

A bikepacking class at REI led to buying a bikepacking bag that attaches to the seat and seatpost. My favorite local bike shop suggested some slightly wider tires that can handle trails, rather than my slick road tires. But I still needed to make sure it would all work. And Clive’s new toy is a carbon “gravel-grinder” bike that can handle a rack and panniers, but not unlimited weight.

Time to test out or new setups. A section of the D&L Trail — from Morrisville, opposite Trenton, to Bristol Borough — seemed perfect. It’s a new ride for us, and I’ve been wanting to check out Bristol ever since I binge-watched Hulu’s Small Business Revolution show.

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I got to ride with Lisa and Dee!

Lisa and Dee are riding the East Coast Greenway from Key West to Calais, Maine. I rode with them for one day.

Dee and Lisa

I’ve been religiously following the blog of the East Coast Greenway’s communications boss and her friend as they ride this 3,000-mile route from Key West to Calais, Maine, impatiently checking for the latest update. Their Florida stories hinted at what I have yet to experience, and once they reached Savannah, I could compare to my own recollections of riding the route, a one-week stretch every year for the past few years. But mostly I would just think: I want to be out on my bike too.

So of course I had to host them one night … and throw a weekday party for them. And when they suggested I ride with them the next day, how could I say no? (Unless my boss did, which he didn’t.)

The plan was to follow the D&R Canal towpath up to New Brunswick and then take the road as far as we got, until it was time to hop the train, me back home and them to meet a friend in New York City.

So off we pedaled, past a blue heron picking its way atop the pipeline already in place to dredge the canal, past a dozen or more turtles sunning themselves on one of the many partially submerged tree limbs, past ducks that hissed as we passed too close to their ducklings.

The surface varied. Parts were badly rutted: The canal had overflowed in some spots during recent heavy rains, washing away a coating of pebbles and exposing jagged spillway stones that our bikes weren’t happy about. Lisa’s front handlebar bag jostled loose at one point, and we couldn’t get the screw to reattach. Other damage probably dated back to some nasty Nor’easters in March. But as we moved further north, past East Millstone, the surface was smooth and we could lose ourselves in conversation rather than dodging potholes and puddles.

Of course, it couldn’t last. I got a flat tire around the time we crossed the Raritan River from New Brunswick into Highland Park. Although I had a spare tube and fixed the flat, my pumping skills left it soft enough to want a bike shop … or the train home.

Guess what we chose.

Sorry I was such a bad influence.

National Trails Day: New Jersey’s Middlesex Greenway

D10DB3DD-BEE1-4BA2-AEF8-AA095947C327I spent part of National Trails Day — June 2 — on the Middlesex Greenway, a 3 1/2-mile trail going through Metuchen, Edison and Woodbridge. Part of it doubles as the East Coast Greenway. It was amazing how many people were using the trail early on a Saturday morning. What a great community amenity— and it’s within blocks of the train station, new condos, downtown and a new supermarket, so really useful for transportation and running errands too.

A group of enthusiastic trail advocates are trying to extend it at either end. This is at the Metuchen end: rails still in place on one side with a rail-free section next to it perfect for a trail. But making that happen means getting Conrail and two rail operators to sit down and talk, and then say yes. One day…