Embracing my inner weekend warrior

When life presents you with lemons you make lemonade, when your spousal unit presents you with a free pass, you go riding and that is exactly what I did Friday after work. The plan was to ride through the Zak Preserve hit the short road section to the Schmid Preserve, pass through our property, hit the DRA trails across the street and then try to find a connector back to our road. All was going according to plan until I was riding through the Schmid Preserve and I noticed some new flagging. I knew that it could be for one thing and one thing only, the River Link trail so my plans immediately changed and I decided to find out where the new trail led. The new river link section of trail promises to be pretty nice. It's soft and untracked right now (and kind of tough to follow) but seems to have some nice flow so with a bit of time it'll be nice.

Popping out of the Zak Preserve

Eventually, I came to the end of the obvious trail and was dumped into some pretty nice double track which I explored for a bit more and made a nice discovery. At one point I dumped out onto a road which is about a mile closer to my office than my normal entry point so in the future I'll be able to avoid about a mile of pavement and more importantly avoid the new england ghetto that I've also been forced to ride through previously.

A cool old stone foundation in the Schmid Preserve.

I swear this pic looked good before uploading it!

Eventually I exhausted all of the double track exploring opportunities so I decided to finish my typical Schmid loop and head home. Until my plans changed again. This time it was for a bit of trail that dead-ended on the trail map but I was in an adventurous mood so I figured I'd find out where it led. A couple minutes in, the rideable trail ended but I was still intrigued by the frontier track I was following. It was hard to see but with a tiny bit of work could be cleared enough to be rideable so I figured I'd see where it lead. Soon, it was dark enough that lights were necessary so I mounted up my stupid, likes to shut off in rough sections, Marwi Titan and continued to hoof it. I sensed that I was getting close to a road so wanted to continue on but started to get worried that I wouldn't be able to follow the "trail" back once it got dark so I turned around and headed out. After looking at the gps track today I'm definitely glad I did turn around because I was at least a mile in any direction from a road. My spidey sense is strong.

my anti-rick nelson