Windsor Road is Open Again !!!

For the past year or so the construction on the Turnpike has caused a lot of problems for my local rides since it involves reconstruction of every bridge over it. Almost every ride I do from my house heads east over the Turnpike and although there are a couple bridges I can use to get over the Turnpike The Windsor Road Bridge is the one I take most of the time. That was until December 2010 when it closed for reconstruction. For those who know me know a closed bridge usually doesn't stop me from using a road but when they closed the Windsor Road Bridge they totally dismantled it so the road was unusable.

I really missed this road this past summer and was glad to see it was finally finished when I road by the bridge at the end of January. There is nothing like riding on smooth fresh concrete and pavement. The new bridge is a little nicer and wider than the old bridge and hopefully it will remain pothole free for a little while. This is the third or forth new bridge they finished across the Turnpike. Some of them like the one just south of Allentown on Circle Road actually was built a lot taller so going over that bridge actually feels like climbing a hill.

There are still four or five more bridges that I normally ride over that still need to be reconstructed (They just closed Sharon Road to start working on that bridge) so it will still be a few more year before I won't have worry about detours for bridge construction.

Snow Biking 2012

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I haven't really minded the lack of snow this winter and the lack of having to remove it from my driveway. Last weekend we did have a little taste of winter. The 2 inches of snow was nothing more than a minor annoyance but it did make the landscape look nicer.

Even before the snow stopped falling I got an email from Chris to go snow biking. Riding around the woods and over logs is tough enough when the ground is clear and dry. Add snow and ice and mountain biking becomes even more challenging but is also a whole lot of fun.

Unfortunately I couldn't make it out with Chris and Mike because snow biking is fun but it is even better when your friends are laughing at you as you fall on your ass. Last year my second mountain bike ride was snow biking with Chris and Mike and although I came away with some bruises it was one of my favorite rides of the year.

With the lack of snowfall this year I wanted to make sure I got out in the snow since this may be my only opportunity this year. 2-4 inches of snow is perfect for snow biking any deeper and its almost impossible to ride through. Riding on snow is not easy because you have a lot less traction so as I started out of the Edinburg parking lot at MCP I ask questioned my ability and wondered if this was going to be as fun as I remembered.

After a few hundred yards I adjusted to the conditions and started to relax and enjoy it. I still am not very good a mountain biking but I did manage to hop over a few logs and not have any major falls. Snow makes everything look better especially the small creeks in MCP park so I made sure I stopped to took a few pictures. I wasn't the only insane person out in the ice and snow I ran across a number of people walking their does and even a couple of people doing some cross country skiing. I was only out for over an hour but it was enough to reaffirm the joy of biking in the snow.

Winter has been very warm and snow free which has made it easy to keep riding on the road but I hope we get a few more small storms this year because I would like to do a little more snow biking this year.

It was suppose to be a towpath ride

This winter has been a lot nicer than the last few. Last year at this time there was over a foot of snow on the ground. This year has been much warmer and there hasn't been a hint of snow yet. That was until this past Friday when the temperatures dipped to the low 20s and we got a quick snow squall. This meant that I wouldn't be going out on the road on the weekend but instead I would head to the canal towpath with the mountain bike

Its much easier keeping warm on a mountain bike since you are in usually in the woods away from the wind and working a little harder making your way over the obstacles. Last year even at 25 degrees in the snow I was warm.

The plan for Saturday was to head up the towpath from Kingston to Amwell and back. An easy ride just to get out for a couple of hours. I was joined by Chris and Mike. As we headed up the towpath we had it mostly to ourselves and only encountered a few other walkers and runners. After we passed Griggstown Mike had to turn back and head back home but Chris and I decided to keep going.

When we got to Blackwell Mills Chris mentioned that there was another trail Six Mile Run that he wanted to check out. I hadn't hear of this area before so I didn't know much about it but according to Chris it had a couple of nice single track trails but he thought it would be too flooded to try. Since we were here he wanted to check out the first part anyway.

I hadn't planned on doing any real mountain bike riding but I figured we'd go a little ways the turn around and head back down the towpath. As it turned out the trail was in better shape than expected. It was muddy in a few spots but because of the cold temperatures most of it was hard and easily ridable. What started out as a quick ride through some single track keep going and going and before long we were 3 miles into the trail.

Chris has been on most of the trails and usually has some idea of where he is going although he usually rides first and worries about where he is after the fact. We ended up following the blue trail all the way to South Middlebush Road. The trail had a interesting mix of terrain and features. Some of the trails were in open fields others through the woods. The trail was easy to follow and had some interesting bridges over and around some of the rivers that flowed through the area. Some of the bridges like the one shown in the photo must have been damaged a little by the hurricane we had it August. Because of the tilt of the bridge Chris almost fell into the river while walking across it.

For the first part of the ride I was able to keep up with Chris although I know he was taking it easy on me. When we hit South Middlebush Road I was getting tired so I wanted to find a take a shorter route back. We didn't have a map so we took our best guess and eventually found our way back to a road that let us to the canal although it was harder to keep up with Chris since he was much better at getting around the twisting trail and up some of the muddier hills.

By this time we had found enough mud so that both us and the bikes were encrusted in mud. In fact I had to kick my front derailleur a few times to get it to shift because all of the mud had glued it into low gear. The ride back down the road and towpath helped clear some of the mud.

What started out as an easy towpath ride turned into a surprise muddy single track ride so I was really beat when I got back to the car. I also felt like pigpen as I was cleaning the mud off myself and bike. Although this wasn't the ride I planned I'm glad we made the detour into 6 mile run because I now have another place to go when the weather gets cold.

Merry Krampus

Its has been a long time since I have posted mostly because I haven't had a lot to say. I have been spending most of my free time trying to finish up the book. The writing is done but putting all the pieces together. manuscript, maps, pictures, etcs takes a lot of time.

I still have been riding. Although the weather has been cool we haven't had many days below freezing or any snow so getting out on the roads for a ride has not been a problem. Most of the rides that I have been doing have been local as I don't venture far from home during the cold weather. Local rides for me usually involves heading east and south and crossing the Turnpike a number of times. Work on widening the Turnpike is in full swing which has closed a number of bridges that I normally use so I have been doing a lot of detours. Some of the new bridges are closed to being finished but I suspect it will another year before things are near normal.

Christmas Eve day I got out for a fun ride with most of the usual gang and evey a few people, like Mike, who hasn't been around much this year. A few people, like Cheryl pictured here, were dressed with antlers or like Jim had a santa hat on. I actually had planned to add a wreath to my bike but didn't have time because of a flat tire. It was a cold and windy ride with a couple of detours to get around the bridge construction but still fun.

With all my spare time going to finishing the book the holidays sort of snuck up on me. I was talking to a friend of mine who lives over in Europe about different Christmas traditions and he mentioned Krampus who is basically an anti Santa Claus and goes around at Christmas time punishing bad kids by stuffing then in a sack taking them home and eating them. That's a lot worst than getting coal in your stocking.

Enjoy your Holidays...

Philadelphia Bike Expo

Bicycle advocacy is alive and growing at least that is the message I took away from the seminars that I attended at the Philadelphia Bike Expo this weekend. The Expo is mostly a bike show with different vendors selling bikes and accessories but it is also a chance for some presentations on different initiatives the various bike advocacy groups are working on.

The first presentation was on bike trail development in South Jersey. It was mostly about new bike trails and bike lanes being adding around the southern part of the state. It's amazing the number of towns adding bike path and bike lanes to try to create a better environment for getting around on bikes. I didn't realize there was that much improvements going on in the state. One of the more interesting parts was when they talked about all the trails and parks that they are adding around the Camden waterfront. The guy giving the presentation was real excited about all the new development and he actually made Camden sound like its actually going to be nice place to bike? I'll believe it when I see it but the drawings of the parks did look cool.

The next seminar I attended was by the deputy head of the department of transportation of Philadelphia. She had a really dry sense of humor and gave a pretty funny talk about how she and her team have worked hard to convince both the politicians and people of the city that bike lanes and path are good for everybody. For example one of her most recent projects was adding a dedicated bike lane on Spruce and Pine. These bike lanes actually removed a lane of traffic from the street but she had data that showed that travel time for cars was actually quicker, accidents for bikers when down by 40% and car accidents were down 25%. I like her pragmatic approach and she and her department should be able to continue to keep improving the bicycling environment in the city.

There was also a good presentation on the Schuyykill trail. Over a million bicyclist use this trail every year and the city is continuing to spend a lot money to improve and expand the trail. In the next couple of years they are going to take back some industrial land south of the Art Museum that will make a nice extension to the trail.

The last talk I attended was by the Bike Snob. If you've read Bicycling Magazine over the last couple of years you probably caught some of his articles. He is basically a bicycle comedian and did a 40 minute talk with pictures about the strangeness of mountain biking his style was a little Seinfeld like... "So what's the deal with a recumbent mountain bike?"  I didn't realize there were so many strange and funny things about mountain biking.

The only thing disappointing thing about the day was the weather. The snow made walking around the city hard and messy and the drive home wasn't a lot of fun either. It also keep the outdoor vendors away from the show so although there were a lot of bike shops and custom bike makers there there wasn't a lot of people selling used bikes and parts. I did get to talk to a few people from the Philly Bike Club and I also got to meet the author of "Where to Bike Philadelphia" It's a really good book that is a little different than the one that I'm working on but it shows the interest and demand for these type of books. It was also nice to talk to somebody else who understand the work required to publish a bike book.

Of course the snow meant that there was no riding this past weekend but hopefully this was just an anomaly and we can have a few more weeks before it starts getting really cold and crappy

The Murals Of Philadelphia

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As I have biked around Philly I have tried to take some pictures along the way that would be good enough to put into the book. The problem this summer was the the weather has been pretty bad. When it was nice enough to ride and I was in Philly it was either hot and hazy or overcast. This weekend the weather was finally perfect so I headed to the city for a photo ride.

The more I bike around the city the more cool things I see and discover. Philadelphia has this program called the Mural Arts Program that connects artists with members of a community to create murals to beautify the urban landscape. As I have ridden around Philly this year I have notice a mural here and there but when I actually started looking for them I couldn' believe the sheer number of them and what great works of art they really are. If you ride down Spring Garden they are almost on every block. The picture above is the Bicycle Mural which is at Spring Garden and 2nd. It's a very colorful and abstract piece of art that actually wraps around two sides of the building. This is one photo that will definitely end up in the book.

My ride this weekend took me on a 35 mile loop from the top of Wisahickon Park to the Ben Franklin Bridge and back. We hit a number of the major sites along the way including the Art Museum, Schuykill River, Independence Mall and Fairmount Park. This was a good route that I really enjoyed.  I'll post the route in the near future so other people can enjoy the ride. I was joined by Chris on this ride which was good since it gave me a subject to put in some of the pictures. I got a couple of good shots of him by the Art Museum steps including one of him doing a Rocky pose with his bike.

Unfortunately Chris's rear tire had a major spoke problem by the Ben Franklin Bridge. He hopped a curb and twisted his back wheel. He tried to work the spokes but couldn't get it to get much better. He opened the rear brake and rode for a while but after some more tweeking the rear break rubbed against the tire and wore through. At this point his was done and we were into another episode of Tom and Chris's Excellent Misadventures.

With Chris out of commission I left him at Independence Mall while I headed back to the car on my own. I felt bad leaving Chris but with out a spare tire there was no way to get the bike ridable so it was the logical choice.

It took me a little over an hour to get back to the car. I stopped a few times along the way to get a few more pictures for the book. Once back at the car the hard part was getting back to Chris. Although it took me an hour to get back to the car on bike it took over a hour and a half to drive back to him. This was because all the traffic and road closures in this city this weekend. There was some big event in Germantown then a regatta that closed Kelly drive for a stretch and then there was the Occupy Philly by City Hall. As usually in most major city riding a bike is a much faster way to get around than by car.

By the time I got back to Chris he had actually worked on the wheel some more and it gotten it mostly straightened out. I think the lesson here is that it takes patience to fix the spokes of a wheel. So when it happened we tried to do a least amount of work to get the bike barely ridable whereas we should have just taken the time and approached it like we were truing the whole wheel and maybe we might have been able to get the bike ridable.

Despite the mechanical problem it was still a good day. Philly is a gritty urban landscape that can be a little challenging to ride in at times. If you just look at the roads and trails that are crowded with people and car traffic you might be discouraged to ride here. However if you look around at the art, architecture, landscapes and monuments you can find a lot to like here. There are few better places to ride a mountain bike than Forbidden Drive, The roads of Fairmount Park are filled with interesting buildings and sculptures. Boat House Row and the Art Museum are just fun places to hang out and on Saturdays and Sundays it is just plain cool to ride down the car free MLK Drive. Philly is a great place to ride on a nice sunny day.

Ambler Ramble

This week in my exploration of Philly I joined the Philly Bike Club for their Ambler Ramble. This is one of their most popular club rides like the PFW's Cranbury ride. The is a nice 45 mile ride that starts at the Art Museum and makes it out to the country in back. Like most of the rides in Philly it was a combination of back street neighborhoods and park roads.

One of the thing that makes this ride possible is the large number of streets with bike lanes and the lots of little parks sprinkled through out the city. There were a few busy streets along the way but this route has been perfected to over time to reduce the need to do much urban riding.

Of course a good ride would not be complete with out a decent rest stop and when we got to Ambler there was a nice little sandwich shop with good food and comfortable tables both inside and out.

After the rest stop the group broke up into a fast and slow group. I headed back with the fast group as we wound our way back into Philly. The last 10 miles were along River Road and the Schuykill River. There were still signs of the flooding of the past weeks and people were still cleaning up but at least the roads and trails were clear. The last 5 miles were on MLK Drive which is closed to car traffic on Saturdays and Sunday. It's pretty cool to ride on the empty MLK Drive with all the other bikers and made the last part of the ride a lot of fun.

Biking in Philly is a little harder than the outlying suburbs because of the traffic and congestion of the city but what I have learned in my travels here is that with little determination and careful route planning its not to hard to find a good route to enjoy here. If you're interested in trying the Ambler Ramble I suggest you join the Philly Bike Club some Saturday morning or you can do it on your own with the route posted here  http://www.mapmyride.com/routes/view/448390