I finally got myself a mountain bike. It’s of course tossed together from the several other discarded bicycles, but it’ll work for now. . . The rear rim was about 4″ out of true, Justin straightened that up for me, and I ended up running into a few guys from Budget Bicycle who validated the beat it on the ground until it’s pretty straight and true it straighter from there method 🙂
So I headed out to find Quarry Park and try hitting some Madison trails on the mountain bike (rather than the 20″ BMX with no suspension. . .). I figured I’d just ride west of Resurrection Cemetary and I should run right into it. Of course it turns out that Hoyt Park (that I didn’t know existed) is actually closer west than Quarry Park.
I found some cools trails in Hoyt, but of course when I got into the park from the trail I turned around to see a big “NO BICYCLES” sign – sigh -. While I was riding the gravel path I decided to take one of the periodic offshoots and see where it went. It looked like the perfect path, it was straight downhill, lots of trees and logs. I got about 100 feet and I nearly ran into a fence, so I hung a right and followed the path along the fence. It just kept getting narrower and narrower until I couldn’t ride the bicycle anymore. I figured I’d try dragging it though this section until it got better again – but it never did. Turns out the trail was a deer trail that looked like a people trail. By the time I realized it I was so far along that it would be less work to keep dragging the bike out.
This of course wasn’t bad, until I broke out of the woods and into a small clearing, and looked up to see a large brick wall with several people staring at me like I was bigfoot bursting out of the woods!