I might be busy for tomorrow's Opening Day, what with babysitting and baking #2 son's 21st birthday cake, so I took a little spin up and down the trail in Lexington today. The weather was warm, the snow was melting, and the root cracks were sprouting. Though clear and mostly dry, the trail is bumpier than last year.
West from Bedford St., Lexington
Today: 4.4 miles. This year: 9.3 miles.
The Rails-to-Trails Conservancy declares March 30th as a nation-wide Opening Day for trail season. It might be nice or it might recall 1997's April Fool's Storm.
In the past few years of bikeway plowing, the clear path often ended at Bedford Street in Lexington. I walked today from Camellia Place out to 128 and was pleased to find the trail clean, though damp, the entire way. As experience is my guide, the damp will continue until the snowbanks have melted away. With forecast highs around 40F every day, that could happen in the next couple of weeks.
West of Revere Street, Lexington
Opposite Lexington DPW
The parking lot at Hurd Field in Arlington Heights is open again after months of reconstruction with porous paving that reduces runoff. The lot will stay open while a few project details are finished up.
The Hurd Field ramp leading to the lot
The porous pavement is coarse and open
There haven't been clear markings for years
Porous pavement project info at the northeast corner
My wife and I took a walk from our hotel on Sunday morning and unexpectedly found ourselves at the southern end of the Route 390 Trail. The trail starts at the interchange of an interstate highway with a heavily traveled, divided, six-lane commercial road (Ridge Road West), but immediately drops below street and highway level into dense woods along a pond. We saw a rabbit on the trail, ducks and herons on the water. It was wonderful and surprising.
Checking a map later, we learned that the trail runs about five miles north from where we started, nearly to Lake Ontario, to meet the Lake Ontario State Parkway Multi-Use Trail. We had unknowingly seen a different section of it the day before, where it runs alongside a nursing home parking lot off Latta Road.
Each year I put off training for the JPMorgan Chase Corporate Challenge until about now and it's true again this year. What's different is that the run is July 12th instead of the usual late June and I'm really not too late. So I didn't skate this morning, but walked a brisk 3.5 miles from Hurd Field to Mill Street and back. Next week, a light jog.
Between Woburn Street and Fletcher Avenue, Lexington
This morning I saw an outbound bicyclist with two young children in an open cargo bin toward the front of his bike. This afternoon one office-mate was telling another about the hazards of pedestrian life in Amsterdam, with their swarming, speeding cyclists. "And the kids just sit loose in these big baskets!" Sure enough, a little image-googling turns up a Dutch bicyle something very much like the one I saw.
Today's other unusual sight was a utility cover lifter in use near the Woburn Street Crossing. I'm sorry I didn't have my camera, as I can't find an on-line photo of a lifter with a counter-weighted handle such as this one seemed to have.
Most of the trail's root cracks and bumpy sections have been marked with white paint recently, mostly in little perpendicular stripes like Frankenstein's neck stitches. Some larger areas are marked by stenciled CAUTION BUMPS advisories. It looks like the cheapest possible approach to the problem short of outright neglect. And as the markings are the same through Arlington and Lexington, I'm guessing they weren't done by the towns, but unofficially.
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