It was the third day of our trip but the second day of biking.
(Our second day in Illinois was cold, wet, and windy. We spent the afternoon in the National Great Rivers Museum and I finished a wonderful collection of short stories, Home of the Floating Lily by Silmy Abdullah.)
The weather wasn’t warm–see forecast above–but we were keen to ride anyway.
For our route we chose the Ronald J. Foster Heritage Trail. “The paved path travels 12.2 miles between the villages of Glen Carbon and Marine and hooks into a 130-mile network of interconnected trails that MCT has been creating since 1993. The trail is named for a former mayor of Glen Carbon, Illinois; the city originally built the trail on the disused corridor of the Illinois Central Railroad in 1991. Illinois Central was one of three railroads that passed through the coal-rich community from nearby St. Louis, Missouri. In 2012 the village transferred trail ownership to Madison County Transit, which upgraded and extended it.”
All told we rode about 40 km and Sarah says only about 10 km of that was into the wind, across an open field! Once again that was on the way home. The sections through the woods were pretty nice and sheltered and I imagine, in the summer, riders would appreciate the shade too. Jeff and I had cold toes–I should have brought shoe covers–but Sarah made the sensible choice of wool cycling socks and she was fine.
Just after we were done and had all the bikes back on the rack the heavens opened and it started to pour rain. Perfect timing.
