Hikes: September, 2016
September 3: Bike-Hike To Green Hill Park and back. About 25 miles, about 3 of which were on foot.
What with a sore right achilles and a determination to have it not meet the same fate as the left one some 13 years ago (operation! big nasty cast!), I happily took the ortho doc’s recommendation to put it into a boot for a month, with “a four in five chance” it would be OK to resume running after that. Well, also after period of stretching and strengthening.
So in that context, the primary distances of our month’s forays were on wheels, with a few tacked-on short walks, a la the short walk in Salem’s Green Hill Park (reached via Brandon Avenue, Roanoke River Greenway and a bit of Mill, Main and Diuguids in Salem) up the hill at the back of the park for about 3 miles.
The nifty part of these treks was that lunch somehow came to be on the biking part instead of the hiking part, so we ended up in places like Mamma Maria’s on this day, with their good lunch buffet enjoyed before we hit Green Hill Park.
September 10. Bike-Hike on Roanoke River Greenway to Tinker Creek Greenway. About 16 miles, about 3 of which were on foot.
We headed east on the Roanoke River Greenway this time, getting off the bicycles just beyond the sewage treatment plant where things get steep, and walking up the Tinker Creek Greenway far enough to accomplish 3 miles on foot.
We rode as far as it was easy to do so, and then got off the bikes and walked where things got steep. Lunch was on the way back home at the Wasena Tap Room and Grill.
September 17. Hike from home to The Green Goat via Roanoke River Greenway. About 4 miles.
What with a weekend full of grandkids and soccer games, we took the opportunity to get Tyler and Reese to ride their bikes while we walked. Tyler, 9, could speed ahead and loop back to his heart’s delight. And Reese, 5, could do things like learning to use her coaster brakes and show enough comfort on her training wheels that she ought to be done with them soon. The side light to this trek was not a light at all but complete darkness on the way back, which bothered no one except The Day Hiker/Gigi, who handled it pretty well once we got going.
September 24. Bicycling the New River Trail from Foster Falls and the side trail into downtown Pulaski and back. About 48 miles.
Well, the plan was for about 36 miles, from Foster Falls to Draper Mercantile for lunch and then back. But alas, we rolled up to a totally empty parking lot at Draper Merc, which was closed for a special event. So, given that we’d carried nothing but water and the only places for sustenance lay ahead in Pulaski, we pushed on the additional 4 miles, plus the 2.5 into Galax, for a later-than-projected lunch at Al’s on First in the Jackson Park Inn. A nice lunch for sure, and the beer was cold, but that longer-than-planned ride back loomed.
The evidence that we had planned the perfect distance became clear when, over the last 10 or so miles of the return, we began to exchanges notes on the state of our posterior parts, as we learned that 50ish miles on a gravely, mix-surface trail is a bit harder on the body that the paved 50ish we undertook earlier the year on the Capital Trail between Richmond and Williamsburg.
