Biking around the Lake

Saturday morning we got up early, had a delicous breakfast and went for another bike ride. We had 15 more miles to ride so that we could say we'd ridden all the Trail of the Couer d'Alene's. We decided to save this part of the trail for Saturday rather than adding it to our long ride on Friday. I'm glad we did it that way because we were well rested and we could really appreciate what a beautiful ride it was. The trail was right along the Lake Couer d'Alene. This part of the trail was much busier with riders than our ride on Friday. Families with their kids and dogs, people walking, fisherman . . . all of them were out enjoying the beautiful area. There are some beautiful homes all along the Lake and the riding that section of trail allows you to go by some awesome properties. It was fun to imagine what it might be like to have a home on the Lake. You couldn't ask for a prettier view. I was kind of surprised to see lots of apple trees along the trail and near the lake . . and they were loaded with ripe fruit. In the background you can see the bridge that cross the Lake. It's an awesome bridge with long spans on both ends. The ride to the bridge is 7.5 miles.

Randy's on the bridge looking pretty pleased. It's a great view from the top because it's high enough to allow large ships to pass under it.

The trail leading up to the bridge kind of goes in a stair stepping fashion - it's flat, then it goes up, then it flattens out again - all the way to the top. I'd never seen anything like it before and it was kind of fun to ride on it. You can see by looking at the rails how it makes gradual steps down the sides.

On the top of the bridge was a nest with Ospreys. This one flew off the nest onto this pole and sat there watching us the whole time we were on the bridge. They are beautiful birds and they have an ideal spot for fishing. There were a lot of Osprey on nests in some of the marshy areas and it was fun to watch them as they tried to catch fish on the Lake.

We had to stop on our way back to Harrison
to take a picture by this strange creature someone had made. It was made out of old motorcycle parts and who knows what else. It looked kind of like a preying mantis. Anyway, this critter was pretty clever and gave us something else to talk about.

By the time we got back to Harrison, we had ridden another 15 miles. By doing that we'd ridden all of the "Trails of the Couer d'Alene's". Friday and Saturdays ride was a total of 72 miles, plus Thursday's ride on the Hiawatha Trail of 30 miles. That gave us a three day total of riding 102 miles! I'm not sure we'll ever have conditions to ride that distance again, but I'm so glad we did it. If someone told me I'd have to ride a hundred miles I'd tell them there's not way I could do it. . . but we did!

I feel like one reasons we were able to do it was there was some downhill on both trails, a lot of flat land, great paved trails, perfect temperatures, miles of tree lined trails - so we were riding in the shade and we broke it up into very "do-able" size chunks. It was a wonderful experience and an accomplishment I think we can be pretty proud of . . . especially for a couple of old guys. It definitely was a memorable trip.