Aug
24
Ride to (almost) Concord
August 24, 2009 | Comments Off on Ride to (almost) Concord
Don’t remember where I found the original route data (transposed here) but I loaded it up onto my Garmin Forerunner 205 and headed out, not at all knowing what to expect from the roads out there (Google street view gives up once you pass I-95).
Decidedly, I wasn’t quite in the proper shape for completing the whole ride, so I took a shortcut and ended up taking this route. The ride was generally good, despite that the planned course led me to a private road and an unpaved Sandy Pond Rd which was actually shown to be paved on Google Street View! Got a nonplussed look from a farmer as I rode down another dirt road longcut. Finished it off by taking nice smooth and wide Beacon back into Cleveland Circle.
This was my first venture to riding in the hilly west-of-Boston area, and I found about 5/6 of the roads to be amazingly smooth and the other 1/6 to be terrible. Extremely low traffic on most of the roads made it enjoyable. There’s no way I’d ever ride out there without some sort of pre-planned route on my GPS, though. The Forerunner is a great tool for experiencing new rides without getting extremely lost. Or just finding my way to somewhere in Boston.
I know this is a pretty boring post, but I just wanted to let the internet-cyclists out there know that Sandy Pond Rd. is currently unpaved (just temporarily, it seems). Also, don’t ride out there because I want it to myself.
