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Riding With The Cranes
For my first significant bike ride of 2020, feeling a little rusty, I chose the route I like to call the Hour Glass. A roughly ten-mile ride that maps out in a figure 8 shape that typically takes me about an hour to ride in my typical average 10mph speed. This one took me about 75 minutes at an average speed just under 7mph, feeling gassed on the home stretch and pretty sore on the return back home. But it was the good kind of sore.
We are lucky where I live to have been on the cutting edge of the Rails-to-Trails movement, whereby former railroad rights of way, now usually owned by power utilities, host multi-use trail systems. The Illinois Prairie Path, founded by environmentalist and author of Reading the Landscape Mae Watts, was in the vanguard of the wildly successful efforts to create and expand on these gems of transportation. I never got into the fat tire bikes, but they allow those who are into it to ride all year round, here where the rivers freeze and summer ends. Many parts of the regional trail system are also great for cross country skiing and snowshoeing. The Hour Glass route is a pattern that includes parts of the Elgin and Aurora Spurs of the Illinois Prairie Path and part of the Great Western Trail. There are other parts of the regional trail system creating loops of roughly 20 and 30 miles with access in under a mile away from our driveway. This is a feature that keeps us where we are…