Three days, about 170 miles on the East Coast Greenway. Plus another 40 miles around Portland.
Live by the Garmin, die by the Garmin.
We certainly needed the help of our electronic gadget to find a few trails that are part of the East Coast Greenway on the second half of our P2P (Providence to Portland) adventure.
I’m especially thinking of one with an unmarked, overgrown entrance on curve of a neighborhood street and another spot where it helped navigate us from Somerville’s Assembly Point neighborhood to the start of the Bike Trail to the Sea in Everett (though we still struggled with the MBTA parking lot and roads surrounding it — how about signage for the benefit of area residents, never mind strangers like us, Everett?)
But we also opted to follow the Garmin’s directions over East Coast Greenway signs, and that led us to this “road” in North Berwick, Maine:
We hit part of the Eastern Trail in Maine and went off-route for hipster ice cream in Biddeford. (Hipster in the nicest way, of course.)
You might remember my not-so-patient wait for ice cream during last year’s week-long ride along the East Coast Greenway in Maine. Because of course you should eat ice cream while biking whenever possible.
We were back in Maine this month to visit friends. They said they’d be up for a bike ride …. so off we went on the Eastern Trail, another part of the East Coast Greenway. The section from Kennebunk to Biddeford is hard-packed, not asphalt, and in one spot a bit muddy after some rain. Glad we had the hybrids. It switched to quiet road through Biddeford and into Saco, where we stopped for lunch at a cute cafe with a deck. I, however, was more interested in ice cream. Not on the menu. Fortunately the waitress was a connoisseur and pointed us in the right direction.
So once everyone was fortified with real food (and my “side” of pulled pork had to be the equivalent of a breadless sandwich — somewhere between a quarter pound and half pound), off we headed to Biddeford and and the Sweetcream Dairy.
Our Maine friends and their ice cream
Oh, hipsters. This place is a registered dairy and milk processing plant. Can your favorite place in Brooklyn, Portland or wherever claim that? It batch-pasteurizes its milk. Locally sourced, of course. Provenance on the website. Maine herbs and fruits. I’d say it’s mostly farm-to-table for the ice cream crowd. And located in a repurposed mill — more hipster points.
“Mostly” locally sourced because how do you get local chocolate? Lemon and poppyseed? Key lime? In that true hipster way, it was well-curated — no 31 flavors and all that. Yet I was tempted by so many — rhubarb sorbet, perhaps?
A couple of samples later, I picked the dark chocolate. But there’s a twist: It was vegan. So not me. No idea what the secret non-dairy ingredient was, but it was awesome. I went for the kiddie size and it was so rich, I really could have used one of the citrus flavors to offset that. (Wonder if they’d do a half-and-half in a cup?) A single scoop would have been too much.
Sweetcream, get yourself a sign to and from the Eastern Trail!
All in all, nearly a 20-mile ride. One day I’ll ride the rest of the trail, from Portland down to the New Hampshire border. Stopping for ice cream, of course.
It’s always exciting to read about gaps in the East Coast Greenway being closed. There’s been good news in Delaware and Maryland (and of course Connecticut, which I’ve written about earlier).
Delaware Gov. Markell and the East Coast Greenway ride in 2014
Back in 2014, I took part in my first East Coast Greenway Week-A-Year ride, pedaling from Philadelphia to Fredericksburg, Va. We rode on some great trails, of course, but we also were on roads plenty of times (some good, some bad).
So I was excited to come across two items Friday that show gaps on the trail are being closed.
One of the most ambitious projects that will now be completed with this authorized funding is the Wilmington-New Castle Greenway, a safe, direct, paved, flat and nearly uninterrupted non-motorized six-mile travel route between the Wilmington Riverfront and downtown New Castle. Another project that will gain additional momentum is the Lewes-Georgetown Trail, a 10 foot wide paved trail that will extend a total of 17 miles all the way from Lewes to Georgetown, creating the longest trail in Delaware.
The East Coast Greenway goes from Wilmington to New Castle; maybe one day there will be a direct Wilmington-Newark route. No word yet on how quickly construction can happen, but it’s still a great step.
The Lewes-Georgetown Trail isn’t part of the East Coast Greenway but it’s about getting people to and around the beaches. and of course people already are biking on vacation — here’s a recent news article about some badly needed signage down in Rehoboth. Another bonus: it connects to New Jersey and the Cape May area via the ferry at Lewes.
Some of the 2014 group advocating for a safe crossing in Perryville
The day’s other news is that the bridge over the Susquehanna River between Perryville and Havre de Grace opened for bikes on Friday. This is a great victory! Sure, there are some complaints (and yes, we have to pay the toll too), but it’s far better than being barred. When we were here in 2014, the boats that were to shuttle us over never showed (they got the wrong day), so we were bused over the bridge.
Bridges. That’s the costly and really time-consuming part. If it had taken a new bridge to close this gap, we’d be waiting a long time. It’s also the gap in the WB&A trail from Washington to Baltimore. We rode part of this trail in 2014 too. The East Coast Greenway route goes from Baltimore to D.C. via Annapolis, and the vision is have a traffic-free route there too. A 1.7-mile gap on that leg closed in May because a developer realized it made sense for his own project (no doubt with some prompting).
But I always wonder what could be done to make bike bridges less expensive. Would more prefab parts help, vs. constructing on site? Do construction standards require that they be able to support something as heavy as an ambulance and that adds to the cost? Can anything be done? Or is this just the unfortunate reality?
Exploring by bicycle 