In Which We Take An Unplanned Sunny Journey

Blue heron on Cedar Lake, Aug. 23, 2015.

One of my daughters stopped by Sunday, and we decided to ride our bikes, for no particular reason other than it was a nice sunny day. The day was a bit windy, as it turns out, but still a gorgeous Sunday afternoon to be biking on the Cedar River Trail.

We started off heading south to Mount Mercy, since the trail is closed at 42nd Street. We joined the trail at J Avenue and headed downtown.

On Cedar Lake, there was an odd looking lump on a log—but then the lump put its head up. It was a heron, and later we spotted another bird of the same type on a sand bar in the Cedar River.

The nice afternoon attracted a number of joggers and bikers to the trail, and I was pleased to see some family groups out. Still, it felt like the trail should have been more crowded. Attention, CR bikers, just because RAGBRAI is over doesn’t mean that biking on our trails is a bad idea …

Anyway, we ended up at a city park on the south end of town, having an amusing, brief dialogue with some other bikers who also stopped there. “What town is this?” one of them asked. Ummm, that would be Cedar Rapids, Iowa’s second largest city—kind of hard to miss. If you go south a bit, you’re in Ely. “Oh,” she said. “We started in Ely.” So, you headed north from Ely and encountered residential development and a city park and wondered what town you were in?

The bikers were a bit older than my daughter and I. I hope none was a navigator in a B52 during Vietnam, or they probably bombed India.

Well, at least these senior citizens were out enjoying the almost perfect (the wind dial could have been turned down a notch) biking afternoon. In the end, my daughter and I rode more than 25 miles.

Not too bad for a spontaneous afternoon ride.