Growing up I rode bikes around my city neighborhood and the lakefront with my dad and my brother, but sometime in high school I got this (hopefully false!) sense of premonition that I would get some kind of spinal injury from riding a bike. So I stayed away from them for years.
Now, living out in the far suburbs, it’s pretty easy to go for a bike ride and I feel less paranoid. It seems as though developers and mayors realized in the 1980s and onward that people like bike trails and they started incorporating them into community planning. Bolingbrook has a ton of bike trails, although admittedly, they don’t all connect to one another or go anywhere especially interesting. One even is abruptly interrupted by a large creek which apparently no one ever got around to building a bridge over.
There are also forest preserves everywhere out here. Two weekends in a row, Adam and I have put our bikes on the car and driven to some woods or prairie with a crushed limestone trail winding through it for 5-10+ miles, less than twenty minutes from our house. Here’s the one we went to today:
Waterfall Glen is a green necklace around Argonne National Laboratory. Although the Lab is surrounded by barbed wire fence, so you only see these buildings from a distance. But there’s lots of other nice things to look at: the namesake waterfall (although it was built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 30s, and not Mother Nature), a model airplane field, prairie, marshes, and woods, flooded quarries, an old cemetery, stone and concrete building remains, and lots of wildflowers. There are hills, twists and turns, and some nice views, so it’s not total Illinois flatland, either.
I wish I could’ve recorded the spring peepers, chirping away along the trail, but I did take some photos from my ride: (Adam likes to go fast while I pedal leisurely and look around, so we split up on bike rides)
The glorious falls!
(Yes, our Illinois expectations are a bit low concerning waterfalls…)
Downstream.
“Lincoln Park Service”? — The Lincoln Park Commission (predecessor of the Chicago Park District) owned some of this land from 1907-? and used it for topsoil and a plant nursery. But I could be wrong.
Wildflowers… including Dutchman’s Breeches, lower left.
This bike was a family birthday present. No shocks, but I love everything else about it. Three gears is great for me. Simple is good.
Adam with his iPhone – he tracks all kinds of things about the ride. My man loves data.
Where will the next ride be?
