Friday, December 9, 2011

Green Springs Park Bike Ride

It was a little overcast to day but it was warm and there is a chance of rain tomorrow (Saturday) so we loaded the tandem on the back of the car and headed of to Green Springs Park, over by the Historical town of Enterprise,Fla. Green Springs Park is a little hard to find since it's not on the maps, or at least the ones I have so here's the GPS data 28.86306N / 81.24881W, this is to the parking lot.

The park is very nice it has a couple picnic areas, kids play area an entrance bike path to a section of the East Central Regional Rail Trail, right now there is only about 3 miles or so paved and completed but when they finish and tie everything together it will be close to 50 miles.







Reflections in the spring, you can see why they named it Green Springs.









One of the Boardwalks
Area still under construction
We started out going right when we hit the trail and after about a mile it hit a main street that had the path along side it, too much traffic noise so we turned around and headed the other direction. After about 3 miles we had to go around a small barricade, the path was paved but the wood fence was still under construction, after another mile is turned to very hard packed dirt, another mile and we hit the construction crew pouring concert for the driveways that crossed the path and we were forced onto the street about 50 feet from the path. There was no traffic and we were just getting warmed up so we continued on down the road, we came to a fork in the road and we took it, a little later we came to another fork and took that one too. Well one thing led to another and we just kept wandering around taking what ever road or street looked interesting until we finally decided that we were totally LOST. There are a zillion little lakes in this area so none of the road go straight for more then half a mile and 99% are dead ends, the good news is that I had a small hand held GPS in the handle bar bag tracking our distance and the bike route. Twenty minutes of playing with that I pretty much figured out where we were and roughly how to get back to the car. I had noticed that the longer we wandered around lost the deeper and growlier Cathy's voice became, once I told her I knew the way back and it was just a few miles, her happy go lucky voice returned and I was able to stop worrying about my unprotected back. Twenty minutes and two wrong turns later we were back at Green Springs Park, as we approached the car I sped up went past the car and asked her if she was ready for LAP TWO, that's when I felt a hard smack right between the shoulder blades of my unprotected back. A quick check of the odometer showed that our 3 to 6 mile ride turned into 19 miles.
GREEN=Paved      YELLOW=Paved under construction      RED=Packed dirt

Now believe me, if any of this was my fault I would gladly take the blame, but I'm having a hard time convincing Cathy that all the blame falls on her shoulders. I'm going to need a little help her from Odel over at Semi-True Tales on this one (Ex Fighter Pilot), I need him to explain to her that the pilot rides up front and the navigator rides in the rear seat, so when we get lost it's the fault of the rear seat. I'm glad you guys are back on the road, I missed your writings.


Cathy's not really as small as she looks here, it's a Tandem bike and the front half is a 21 inch frame and the rear half is a 17 inch frame, plus the camera angle, but if the picture was bigger you would see that she's not peddling, at least that's what everybody we pass always tells me.





That's it for today but I sure hope Cathy has learned from her mistakes and does a better job on tomorrows adventure.

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