You Can't Always Believe the Internet

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The Internet is an invaluable research tool and has helped me find cool places to visit and good roads to ride on as I continue to work to my way around Philadelphia. I've done 3 more rides around the city over the last couple of weeks. Before each ride I usually spend an hour or so working out the route and finding information about the what I'm going to see along the way.

Google Maps is one of the main tools I use. Between the satellite view and the street view feature I can do a virtual ride of the route and find which roads to avoid and which roads are bike friendly. Although I use Delorme's Topo USA to map out the ride and make a cue sheet I just found a new free tool that can take a route on a Google Map and automatically make a cue sheet or GPX file. Its called Google Cue and you can find instruction how to use it here.

The pre ride research has allowed me to have a good idea of what the ride will be like ahead of time and what to expect along the way. So when I rode the route I had planned to the Bryn Athyn Cathedral I saw exactly what I expected. The roads were through some quiet residential neighborhoods with not too much traffic. There were a couple of busy intersections in Jenkintown that I new would be there but confirmed that they were no problem to bike through. And the cathedral was a magnificent as was described on Wikipedia.

Likewise my ride through Pennypack park's paved trail proved that is was as nice a place to ride as many people on yelp.com had described. The trail is wide and smooth there are plenty of cool bridges and views along the way. The state penitentiary was at the end of the trail as expected. Of course what I didn't expect was for the escape alarm to sound while I was next to the prision so got the hell out of there before the inmates got over the wall.

This past weekend I decided to do one of the mountain biking rides for the book so I headed to Wharton State Forest. According to a couple of web sites on mountain biking there is a well marked trail by the Atison Ranger station call the Quaker Bridge Hampton Furnace Loop Trail that sounded like an easy ride along the sand roads with a couple of cool things to see along the way.

So I got to the Atison Ranger station around 9 am on Saturday and the map there seemed to confirm what the map I saw online said so I headed off down the road. It had rained heavy the night before so although I was riding on sand roads that usually drain well I still had to go through a few puddles of water. The sand on the roads were a little deep in spots so it was a little tough getting traction at times.

The first problem I noticed was that the trail had no markings. There were suppose to be blue blazes to mark the trail, but no matter, the route I had mapped out was pretty simple to follow there were 4 or 5 turns so as long as the miles worked to where the sand roads crossed I could find my way around. I also had my GPS just in case.

As I continued on through the wet loose sand roads I notice there were a lot of sand roads crossing and it would be very easy to get lost in here if you didn't have a GPS. The bugs were also becoming a problem. They were Jurassic in size and no matter how fast I pedaled I always had a swarm of 10 or 15 trying to bite me. The last straw that made me decide to abort the ride is where I came to the river crossing and all that was left of the bridge that I was suppose to use to cross the river was a couple of large posts sticking out of the river.

I retraced my steps back to my car and scratched this ride off the list for the book. I through I would have to head back home to do some more research to find a new ride to do down here but as it happened I ran into another mountain biker in the parking lot who said I should check out the trails down in Batsto which was just a few miles down the road.

So down to Batsto I went where I found 4 different interconnected trails to choose from. These were all single track trails from 6 miles to 19 miles long. I did a 10 mile loop that combine a couple of the trails. It was a nice single track trail that wasn't really challenging but it was fun to ride. It was exactly what I wanted for the book. So although research can help you find some good rides sometimes you can't always trust what you find. Sometimes you just have to go out and ride and be open to change your plans and explore other opportunities.