Depending upon how adventurous you are, the first 8-mile installment of the Neuse River Greenway is open.
Based on a scouting expedition yesterday, roughly 7.9 miles of the Raleigh greenway, which eventually will run the length of the Neuse in Wake County, are finished. That tenth of a mile that’s not technically opened is over two short stretches. The first comes 2.6 miles from the northern trailhead at Falls of Neuse Road just below Falls Dam. There, a boardwalk is under construction: the footings and supports are in, the decking being screwed down. Although the area beneath appeared wet, tracks to the side of the structure suggested it had been bypassed by cyclists and travelers afoot.read more
I can’t remember where we were — the middle of Nebraska? the middle of Missouri? — but it was time to visit another rest stop. We’d been driving for a day and a half, a day and a half and twelve hundred miles of sitting with virtually no exercise. My body was starting to petrify, my mood was increasingly surly. Marcy hopped out, opened the rear hatch of the M5, rooted around for a moment, then emerged with the antidote.read more
Monday — never an easy time for the outdoors enthusiast, especially come summer. After a weekend of adventure, returning to the humdrum work-a-day world can make one melancholy. To help ease this trying transition, we’re running a new feature every Monday, at least during the summer, called 90 Second Escape. Essentially, it’s a 90-second video of a place you’d probably rather be: a trail, a park, a greenway, a lake … anywhere as long as it’s in the sun.read more
If you live in the eastern part of the state, Irene promises more adventure than you’d care to handle. Thus, it’s a good weekend to head west.
Coast
We’re going to bypass the coast this weekend for obvious reasons. If you live Down East, you’re probably not thinking about where the nearest 5K is, or whether there’s a group paddle nearby. If you don’t live Down East, the region probably isn’t high on your list of recreation destinations.read more
… where I’ll be spending the next three days getting around exclusively by bike and mass transit. It’s an exercise largely to see what it’s like to be mobile in a city with extensive bike paths and routes, a city where bikes are accepted and incorporated into the transportation system. I’m also interested to see how bike transport integrates with Denver’s mass transit system, RTD, which includes an extensive bus network and hugely popular light rail system. (As is currently the case in the Triangle, light rail here was decried here as a waste — until it was built. Now, the pressure is on to expand the system.)read more