The first 42 miles

Brice and Susan, starting our journey by dipping our rear bike wheels in the Atlantic Ocean (in Selby-on-the-Bay, Maryland). And we did in fact stay off the wetland grasses.

Today we started out our bike trip, somewhat symbolically, by biking from the Chesapeake Bay to our house in Silver Spring, MD. (Our goal is to bike from ocean to ocean.) If we were taking route 50 and the Beltway it would have been quite a bit shorter, but on bikes we went a total of 42 miles, according to Brice’s odometer.

We went with two of our bike-enthusiast friends, Brian and Abby (aka Lazerface and The Rock), who drove us and all of our bikes out to the Bay to start our day.

The parking lot in the park we started off from held an osprey nest on the platform alongside a light for the baseball field. When we arrived back at the end of the day with our car to get Brian and Abby's, we spotted Momma Osprey landing back in the nest and feeding her babies. Pretty awesome.

"Me putting on my sleeves is not very exciting."

We rode from Selby-on-the-Bay through Davidsonville, whose gorgeous pastures included one housing llamas, much to Brice’s excitement, and into Bowie. Continuing on into Lanham-Seabrook, we met a man in the tunnels going underneath the train station there who was sitting on a running riding lawn mower and smoking a cigarette, for reasons that were not clarified. Going through New Carrollton we turned into Greenbelt Park, whose intimidating hills were made rather deadly by the fact that we’d already gone 28 miles by then. Surviving, we continued on through Berwyn Heights and then into the University of Maryland, where I got to relive the old days by using a bathroom in the good old Plant Sciences Bldg. We then went through Brian and Abby’s neighborhood, through Langley Park, and then up Sligo Creek Trail, passing just 3 blocks from my old apartment in Long Branch. Two more brutal climbs faced our burning thigh muscles through downtown Silver Spring, past my old office, and onward to our house, which is located at the top of a final hill that was really just insulting at that point.

We had lunch along a stretch of the Baltimore, Washington, and Annapolis Trail, which we rode along for a couple miles. The best part was the Snickers bar that Brian and Abby shared with us.

The weather was utterly ideal. Our plan had been to go last week, but it was rainy all weekend and threatened thunderstorms. Today there was a 20% chance of rain but all the clouds burned off and it was cool and bright.

After riding back to pick up the car, we had dinner at an Irish place we biked past in Davidsonville. A great way to end a successful first ride! Sláinte!