So I got out on the old bicycle again this morning. It had been awhile, though it’s not been far from my mind recently. I am sure you are all well aware with my madness regarding visiting all 88 Ohio counties in a 24 hour period. Recently I have been exploring a possible route and how long it might take to visit all 88 Ohio counties by bike. Obviously this would be a many-day adventure, and not one that I’m likely to ever actually DO, but the route planning is fun :-).

Barring that, I pondered a bike trip from Cincinnati to Cleveland. There actually is a trail called the Ohio to Erie Trail that runs that route, though it is in various stages of completion, and the stages that are complete are at various levels of “goodness”. I did read one account of a guy who biked it, which I found quite interesting.

In any case, I busted out the old road bike this morning. All of my previous biking adventures have been with Carolyn’s old mountain bike, which is in better condition than this bike. I’m not even sure where this bike came from, though I would suspect from my step-dad. I got out the bike pump last night, pumped up the flat tires and did a test ride, and it appeared to be working fine. So out I set this morning. I ran one of my Madeira routes (Madeira J on my bike log or Route one over here). It’s 4.65 miles – I thought I’d keep it somewhat short for now. When I did this route back last summer, I clocked it in 25 minutes, and when I did it last winter it was 41. I’m not sure why it was so much slower in the winter, though I do remember it being DANG cold. Anyways, this morning I clocked in at 21:07. It felt pretty good. This bike is probably 15-20 pounds lighter than the big mountain bike. And of course, there’s about 20 pounds less of ME to lug around. I could definitely notice it going up hills.

I also have spent some time devising a route to visit the full length of every street in Madeira in one long route. My first draft was 49.6 miles, though I might be able to whittle that down a bit with some modifications. We’ll see if I can get that attempted before the winter cometh. I’ll blog more about that later once I have more confidence in my route.

Which brings me to yet another biking topic – riding my bike home from work. This is something I may have mentioned before here. The way I think I’d do it is to drive with my bike over to the Kenwood Town Center (sic) area, park the car, and ride the bus (with my bike) to work. There’s a route (pdf) that actually goes right by my office, and buses have bike rack space for 2 bikes. Then, after work, I change and bike home.

Here is one possible route – it is 16.7 miles and much of it is on the Little Miami bike trail. That’s the route that I was originally planning on. But after looking at the map, I also came up with this other route. It’s more direct (14.29 miles), but still stays off the major routes for the most part. I might try it out next week. While I’m here, I would just like to throw a major shoutout to routebuilder.org – where those last 2 links went. It is a freakin awesome site for things like this. When the Google Maps API came out a few months ago, I toyed with a site like this, just for my personal use. I never really got any type of UI going or anything like that.