Today's Old Town / Bosque Tracking
Since the weather was once again NICE today, sunny with only mild breezes, we indulged ourselves with another people-powered trike ride. We enjoy parking along the Bosque Trail and riding it since it is almost flat going or coming, north or south-bound, and always has interesting people and trees and river water and critters wandering about in the wild.
Jacque's knee gave her trouble last Friday, getting irritated, inflamed, with painful swelling the next couple days. This did not dissuade her from riding again today - She claims the exercise, though occasionally painful, limbers up her knee and makes it better, not worse, with at least moderate exercise. And away we went. First stop on the agenda was a trip east to Old Town where, at the Quesadilla Grille, we again stuffed ourselves on refried bean and onion Quesidilla and guacamole dip for me and a chicken garden salad for Jacque. Very yummy.
We thought we'd keep it a shorter ride today and "explore" a route parallel to I-40 that we rode as far as Rio Grande a few weeks ago. At that time, we didn't want to cross the un-bike-laned Rio Grande street just feeding hundreds of cars just off I-40 every few minutes. We had an Albuquerque bike route map with us but did not examine it before taking this route: We just wanted to see where it went and assumed we could safely find our way back to downtown, the Bosque parking, and our dinosaur powered SUV. So we rode right back west to the Bosque trail and north to this intersection for our edification.
Well, it was not a bad trail. as far as it went. As you ride north on the Bosque Bike Trail, it makes a short sharp left turn right at I-40 and then a "dog-leg" right turn underneath I-40 and on northward. This aforementioned left turn actually is a T, also going eastbound paralleling I-40. We got to Rio Grande OK, waited with the traffic and crossed the intersection at the light without incident. Only about 2 or 3 miles later the trail suddenly ended at 7th Street, without warning or any signs at all. I dragged out the ABQ map to see if there was any information there, and it indicated the trail actually went as far as 6th street, but no such path exists unless you want to call the curbed sidewalk a bike trail extension, which I don't. The map showed that several of these area streets led straight south to Mountain Road, now AKA "Bicycle Boulevard", so we used the "facilities" at the Chevron station on the corner of 7th and frontage road and then headed south on 7th street. This consists of several industrial businesses close to the Interstate and then older , very older, streets and neighborhoods in the "poorer" part of Albuquerque. It made for very enjoyable bike riding and people watching, with very little auto traffic to worry us. If those old relatively run-down neighborhoods weren't so horribly EXPENSIVE, we wouldn't mind living there.
The "loop" we rode was thus very small in area but, with the "doubling back" and multiple times we traversed Mountain Road, we came very close to our 20 miles we like to achieve. Since I forgot the GPS today we don't have accurate data to base that on; it's only an estimate from looking at the map.
Jacque's leg seems very happy after today's ride, which you may imagine is a WONDERFUL THING.
I finally swapped out the gel-cell battery that had not been holding a good charge for a smaller but more potent one, so the battery readings below reflect the improvement.
Beginning Battery Voltage: 12.9 Ending Voltage: 12.7
Lowest Temp 48.2 F Highest Temp: 59.8 F
Stats from the APRS map: Total Miles: 18-something
Overall average speed Moving Avg Max Speed
8 MPH 9 MPH 9.0 MPH
Total Trip time Moving Time Stopped Time
3 hours 17 mins 2 hours 45 mins 32 minutes
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