Sunday Ride

I took my kids for a ride this weekend. Ava on her trailer bike, Juliana on her Fuji, and me on my Schwinn.
For our ride, we targeted one of my favorite destinations -- Breakneck Hill Farm. This is one of the two farms the town has acquired in recent years, in order to repurpose them as recreational open space. It's a quick 3 mile ride from the house, so it's a great destination while the girls are still strengthening their legs. I want to try the other one as well -- maybe next weekend.

When we got there, we rode a little ways onto the trails, then parked the bikes and took a hike when the girls' mother joined us. The nice thing about the farm is that biking and walking are both allowed on the trails, but not enough bikes use the trails to damage them, so they stay grassy and smooth and uneroded.

The trails form a big loop that cuts across the front hills, then winds along the back side of the farm, back to this bridge. There are a handful of cut-throughs mowed into the pasture to let you shorten the walk, which takes about an hour if you take the whole thing at a leisurely pace. We walked maybe half of it before heading home.

The trustees of the farm maintain a herd of those black and white cows. I understand they were originally purchased to try to keep the brush at bay, but ultimately, the farm had gone too far to seed for that approach to work. It took a persistent effort at mowing and brush clearing to get it back to this state, and I'm sure that there were many bad cases of poison ivy stemming from that effort. In any case, the cows mostly keep to themselves, grazing in the pasture area set aside for them. But in the fall you can get their attention by plucking some (pretty unappetizing to people) apples from the few trees in reach of the trails, which they'll eat out of your hand.

Overall, a nice ride. Next Saturday we'll ride to socccer again, and I hope to to get Ava riding without training wheels for the first time.

All for now,

J