I wanted to get another 20 miles in on the bicycle today. I scheduled to take the bicycle in for its 1,000 mile and winterizing checkup on Tuesday, and I want to actually have 1,000 miles on the odometer. I only had 975. Yesterday I had plotted a course 10 miles east on the flattest course possible. Today I plotted a course 10 miles west on what I hoped was the flattest possible. For both I used Google — yesterday’s course came up “basically flat.” Today’s had something like 300 feet of uphills and 400 feet of downhills.
I noticed that the course Google plotted was more twisting than that for a car. There were segments of 4-lane road that it chose side roads for. The interesting thing was, I got about 5 miles into the course and ran into a closed road. They were pouring concrete and dividers over a quarter-mile segment, that blocked it off in both directions. It was the section that I needed to use to avoid the 4-lane. And yet Google had no idea that this construction, which must have been at least a couple of weeks or a month in progress, was there to chart my course around it.
The sidewalk was open, so I rode my bicycle down the (muddied) sidewalk until the road was usable again. But I got to thinking about whether I wanted to come back this way, and if so, where else would I go to come back? So when I went over a stream and discovered a path next to it, I decided to follow it. That took me, by twists and turns, from near the riverfront up to Vivion Road. I figured I would take Vivion Road back home, only to spot another trail, by another stream, about a quarter-mile along. So I took it. At first it seemed to end another block up, then I noticed where it made a twist around a small park. Suddenly there were miles of it. By the time I got done I was up by 68th street — 10 miles from home with what turned out to be 8 miles left to get home.
Which brings me to the title of this blog. This trail started nowhere and ended nowhere. Perhaps that isn’t true for the people who live along it, but I have to travel a long, unconnected distance to get to it and to get back. You pull up a Google map and ask for it to show bike trails and friendly roads, and you see the same thing. Most of the time when I see a bicycle trail sign, it is going opposite where I want to get to. They design these trails entirely as recreational paths to nowhere. No wonder people don’t use them for any “practical travel.”
At The Rainbow 