Here in the US we are less than a week away from the Thanksgiving holiday. As is true for virtually everyone stateside, this year is going to look different for our little family than in the past.
Our family’s tradition usually involves traveling northward - over the river and thru the woods, quite literally - to Aunt Catherine’s house we go. We spend the holiday itself with the meal, yes, but also playing games and talking and generally enjoying family company. And the following day, MLW and Aunt Catherine brave the Black Friday landscape, the kids play games, Uncle Bradd goes hunting and, most years, I ride the Military Ridge Trail.
This relatively long rail trail is situated in south-western Wisconsin and is almost literally right out of my in-law’s driveway. My first Black Friday foray down this trail was in 2015, taking MLW’s old Schwinn mountain-ish bike (which we recently repurposed as LB’s college ride).
Schwinn at Barneveld on Military Ridge Trail
But it didn’t start to become an actual tradition until I got my Catrike Pocket - the additional wheel made the snowy trail a little easier to contend with on my next foray in 2018.
Pocket @ Blue Mounds on the Military Ridge Trail
It ws so much easier that I rode the trail again last year.
It’s visually beautiful…
…But also a sloppy mess.
So that year, fenders were one of the things I was thankful for.
While this year is certainly going to be different, I am looking at it as a challenge. I’d like to maintain the tradition of riding on Black Friday - it just seems a good thing to follow a day of institutionally sanctioned gluttony with some exercise. And the long-term forecast suggests that the end of next week is planning to have highs in the 50° F range, which is a rare November bonus.
This leads me to thinking about where and how to ride. Most of my riding simply starts out of my driveway, and I could certainly do that - maybe following one of my longer ride routes that I laid out this summer. Of course, while still fun, that makes a ride less special, so I’ve started to consider whether it might be better to tackle a portion of one of the two canal trails - I&M or Hennepin - one last time this year. I get to them rarely - I’ve only been to Hennepin once this year, and the I&M Canal not at all.
Partly that’s an artifact of our very strange times, but mostly it’s an effect of distance - it can be hard to convince myself to drive out to a trail when I’ve got miles and miles of country roads starting literally right off my driveway.
So for now, at least, I’m investigating and considering the options. It hasn’t been raining a whole lot over the past couple of weeks, and there’s only a couple of days with precipitation in the forecast, so the risk of the trails being washed out is relatively low (this is something you want to check for canal trails here in Illinois before you head out). It’s also hunting season here in Illinois, and some of the state parks allow hunting in them for limited periods of time, so I want to be sure I’m not riding where I might be mistaken for a deer (though the trike and I both wear a lot of orange).
...Re-reading the paragraph above makes it clear to me that the distance of the drive to the trails isn’t the only thing that keeps me off of them. It’s a lot of work to get sorted out. But regardless, I think it’s worth it to continue the tradition.