Good Exercise but a Short Ride in the Mud and Snow

this tracking system was blacked out in protest of SOPA this day
Ever since I lost my job I've been trying to reorganize my biking habits so I can keep up with my favorite form of exercise:  Biking.  I have not done well.
The day I was terminated I almost went on an around-Albuquerque loop since my immediate thought was "Well, I always think about it  and today I have the time", but instead went home to break the nasty news to Jacque who for some reason experienced a typical feminine reaction:  WHAT?????? EEEK----"
I've quasi-planned and almost ridden every day since then (not quite a week yet) but today was the first time I've actually gotten on the recumbent and ridden it/  I decided, although it is a very short ride and thus less enjoyable, that I'd ride the 3 miles to the Post Office and back to pick up the mail.  Unfortunately, the first mile going out from the house and the last mile coming back is slippery slimey icky mud.  The dirt road is starting to solidify and dry out in various spots but has lengthy bogs yet that made a MESS of my wheels, brakes, and fenders.
I slogged through this slop and decided, by the time I got to the pavement of Frost Road, that I was NOT going to slog back through it.  I planned to hide the bike in the trees and walk back up to the house and bring back either my car or Jacque's Ford Exploder  - both having bike racks in place - to bring the bike back to the house with less mess stress.
I wish I'd taken the cheapie micro-video camera along.  I'm never crazy about riding on road shoulders, and the distance from our ramp onto Frost Road and the fairly new bike path is about a quarter mile.  Everything was so muddy I had trouble finding the entrance to the bike path but finally got on it, dodging rocks, dirt, and gravel -- it obviously has seen little use since the winter snows began.  Almost immediately I encountered solid banks of frozen snow and ice blocking the path for 2-30 feet or more, forcing me to dismount and frog-walk the bike to the next patch of path pavement wide enough to permit actual riding.  After about a mile and a half of this foolishness - thinking each time I frogged across a patch of crusty snow that surely the rest of the way would be thawed and open  - I almost kicked myself for not thinking to just cross over to the roadway of Frost Road and ride the shoulder-path the rest of the way to the Post Office.  When I did so the trip turned into a nice ride with clear road and dry pavement, with the occasional pot hole to deal with, of course.  When you see cyclists riding on the main road right next to a well known bike path and wonder why, I can assure you:  Riding in the roadway and dodging cars is usually safer than dealing with the typical problems on a bike path, including but not limited to walkers and joggers with blaring ear-buds, cracks and pot-holes that threaten to break a tire, throw you off the road, etc.  Even the "bike lane" striped shoulders are often clogged with rocks, car parts, tiny steel wires from radial tires that imbed your bike tires and sometimes ruin them, etc.
So that's why so many of us ride up on the roadway dodging the petroleum powered behemoths.
 By the time I got to the Post Office I was overheated and then some.  I was only wearing a sleeveless vest and my reflective green-yellow vest on top of that but I peeled off the vest and put only the reflective vest back on for the return ride.  I immediately ran into a quite cold headwind that made me regret removing my layers, but I kept going anyway, knowing on the uphill pulls I'd warm up again.
When I got to my drop-off for our dirt/mud masterpiece road, I rolled down about a hundred feet from the pavement and leaned the bike into a tree clump and walked up to the  house through the mud, drove Jacque's Exploder back through the mud, and rescued the bike.
Lesson Learned:  Forget about the bike path(s) in the East Mountains in the wintertime for weeks after snowfall.  Ride the main road like all the other cyclists do.