Reconnaissance

44.3 mph!! How can I obliterate a speed like that? I was also a little bit curious as to what exactly you were meaning when you said, "we decided to focus on pace this Saturday?" Just having a hard time imagining Debbie suggesting or "deciding" in tandem with you that working on pace would be a really great way to spend a Saturday. But who knows, my parents seem to have been replaced by biking obsessed people who I'm just getting reacquainted with, so anything can happen.

The C&O canal reconnaissance trip ended up being quite a wonderful adventure. I took my bike on the metro from Vienna into Arlington, which was pretty fun in itself. Sometimes, being on the metro still feels like an exciting novelty to me. The Custis trail is easy to get to from the Ballston metro station, so Josh and I met up, biked to his apartment to drop off some things, then to the trailhead. This was my least favorite part of the whole day because I'm not a very good city biker. I tend to get a little bit overwhelmed with cars and lights and pedestrians and such, and I pretty much plowed into Josh's bike when we were going through one particular intersection, which was more embarrassing than anything else, since neither of us crashed. I pretty much just got off my bike and walked head-down to the sidewalk, where I belong. I'm truly a hazard I think, but we did get back on the bikes and the road after a block and we had no more incidents. It felt good when we got on the trail.

The Custis trail is shady, hilly, and paved. It wasn't very crowded at all when we were on it. You come out after a few miles into downtown Arlington again and cross the Key Bridge on a sidewalk that is fairly crowded with pedestrians and bikers. The bike bell doesn't seem to have much of an effect on these people, and calling out "on your left" seems to be just as likely to cause the person to move left into your planned path as it is to cause them to move to their right. Most people seem to be in their own wonderful world of itunes with their earphones in.

Getting down to the Capital Crescent trail is easy from here. There's a path through a small park just after the bridge. You do have to walk the bike down a short set of 5 steps, but then there's a pedestrian bridge across the canal with a ramp and it puts you right on the trail. We biked west on the Capital Crescent until we got to Fletcher's boat house, where we had the option of softdrinks, hot dogs and snickers bars. We ate cake that we'd brought and took a break down by the river. Lots of people were renting canoes and kayaks and taking them out in the Potomac.

We went back after this point and biked through Georgetown to the beginning of the C&O canal and then on to Rock Creek Park in DC. The part of the trail through Georgetown was crowded with people, but I loved it because I thought the old brick buildings along the canal were beautiful. Cake doesn't hold you over for that long though and the Rock Creek Park trail was pretty hilly and my legs were tired tired tired, so we headed back. The Custis trail has some long uphills, which we'd had a lot of fun going down, and not so much fun going up. Actually I was having fun, but have I mentioned that my legs were tired? Because they were. There was no walking though. We rode on the Custis past our side trail back to Ballston to where the trail goes under the interstate and T's into the W&OD. Pretty easy connection there.

We biked a total of 33.4 miles and we had a really big dinner that night. Yum. Sometimes, sitting down to eat a big wonderful meal can seem like the most absolutely wonderful thing. Like when you've biked 33.4 miles on one piece of cake. I felt like when I was a kid and would come in for dinner all tired and dirty and glowing and gosh darn happy after playing kick ball for hours in the back yard. I'm pretty excited that we're going on this bike trip, I think there's going to be a lot more wonderful memories just like this last Saturday, bike crashes and all.