Sebring, FL. It's a rainy Saturday evening as I just completed the long ride of the three-day Highlands Bicycle Festival. The local bike club puts on this festival every year in early December. It's a great opportunity for us Northerners to extend the season by a few weeks. Today's ride was a sunny 80 degrees with billowing clouds and light winds. Florida was reliably flat -- although the locals had some up-ramps that they call hills. This brings to a close my most successful cycling year, yet.
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| Mississippi River Trail, New Orleans, LA |
But, let me update the project. Shortly after the No-Hill Hundred in early October in Nevada, I completed a century along the Mississippi River Trail in New Orleans. The levee makes a nice, quiet cycling environment, although it is somewhat lacking for shade. There are wonderful views of the shipping -- large and small -- moving along the Big Muddy. The trail ends in the western reaches of downtown New Orleans, so I had a chance to ride among the famous streetcars. The ride also provided a sampling of much of the heavy industry along the Mississippi shore, from grain elevators to oil refineries, and the rail lines that serve them. The small towns and plantation houses, many of which grew up as river landings before a levee separated them from the river, seem to cling to a tenuous existence.
And the immense hydraulic potential is evident just to the north of the trail, as the gigantic mile-wide Bonnet Carre Spillway stands ready to divert the Mississippi into Lake Pontchartrain. It strains the imagination to consider a river this large needing an additional river-size spillway to handle a flood. But, we're talking about all the precipitation from Pittsburgh to Denver and everything in between, so there's half a continent's worth of watershed to account for.
Thus, Louisiana became state number 48.
In late October, I enjoyed the second annual Longleaf Trace Century in Hattiesburg, MS. This 'trace' is an award-winning rail-trail that runs some 40 miles to the west of Hattiesburg. It is the crown jewel in a network of greenways in this university town. The Trace shares the same feature of most rail-trails: it is flat. But, to add enough miles to make the ride a century, the organizers added a little off-the-trail spice to the mix. So, while the trains of old enjoyed a well-graded right of way, the surrounding terrain undulates. This in-the-wild section was in the middle of the ride, so the beginning and end provided no surprises.
And, with Mississippi, I now have 49 states.
