I didn’t plan to take the Circle the Triangle route to Durham the morning after Herlihy’s reading, in large part because my bike wasn’t set up. I hadn’t mounted my GPS (critical for navigating the mean streets of Cary to the trailhead), my luggage rack wasn’t attached (mainly for snack hauling), and I didn’t have a glovebox — a small ditty-bag that Velcros to the top tube and holds my iPhone (for Tweeting) and field-size reporter’s notebook. But the GPS mount proved more straightforward than I’d expected and the luggage rack was a quick-release, mounting easily to the seat post. Within 15 minutes I realized all I needed was the glovebox and I was set. After hitting two nearby bike shops I found one that was serviceable and was set. By then it was only 11 a.m., certainly enough time to make it the 35 miles or so to Durham and back. The one potential fly in my 70-mile roundtrip plan: the temperature was already in the upper 80s.

The Circle the Triangle concept, championed by the Triangle Greenways Council, was built on the notion that one day the Triangle’s various municipal greenway corridors would grow to their geopolitical boundaries, and wouldn’t it be swell if they might be able to meet up and form a region-wide pedestrian greenway network. Say, for instance, you were at Meredith College in Raleigh. You could take Raleigh greenway (the Reedy Creek Greenway, to be specific) about 2.5 miles out to Umstead State Park. There, you could pick up the 5-mile bike & bridle trail over to Lake Crabtree, which happens to be where the northern trailhead for the 7-mile-or-so Black Creek Greenway. Black Creek goes into Bond Park, where it hooks up with the White Oak Creek Greenway which runs about the same distance west to the American Tobacco Trail, a 22-mile rails-to-trails project that travels from western Wake County north into downtown Durham. It was a far-flung notion at the time; today, less than four miles of that route remain to be finished. In two years or so the roughly 40-mile route could be done.

With my GPS as my guide, I snaked out of my neighborhood near Cary Towne Center up to Maynard Road. Maynard is a somewhat busy four lane, but the outside lanes are extra wide, accommodating cyclists (cyclists comfortable riding in traffic). After 4.26 miles (the GPS, remember?) I took a left on Castalia Drive and rode less than a mile before picking up the last few hundred yards of the well-marked Black Creek Greenway.

It was here that I had my first Lenz moment: It had taken me 23 minutes to travel the nearly five miles to the trailhead — a pokey 11 miles per hour. Slow, by modern pavement-riding standards, thanks to a series of stoplights on Maynard. Lightening fast in Lenz’s day, when what pavement there consisted of cobblestones  (check out tomorrow’s Stage 3 of the Tour de France). Black Creek took me into Bond Park where I hooked up with the White Oak Creek Greenway at the boathouse and continued west.

One caveat about greenway travel by bike: On weekends, early mornings and late evenings, the greenway — just about any greenway — will be crowded with walkers, strollers, joggers, runners, kids learning to walk. Not the best avenue for a speedy bike ride. When the temperature is in the 90s, however, you have the path to yourself. Thus, I made good time until the first hiccup on this route: a break in the greenway at MacArthur Drive, where Cary greenway officials are at an impasse with Norfolk Southern over how to cross the freight line’s railroad tracks. Fortunately, there’s a quick, mostly bike-friendly detour right on MacArthur, left on Waldo Rood and left again on Davis Drive back to the greenway, which picks up just past Davis Drive Middle School.

Here was the part of the ride I was most looking forward to: White Oak west under N.C. 55 to it’s current end, at Green Level Church Road. The stretch past 55 is about three years old and rolls through a wetland, at times on long stretches of boardwalk. It’s remote, it’s verdant — and, until 2012, it’s closed because it has the misfortune of passing under the under-construction Triangle Expressway. Another Lenz moment.

Frank Lenz encountered many a detour along the way. In China, for instance, the government forbid him from taking his preferred route. Undeterred, he found alternate routes, especially challenging considering he didn’t travel with maps. (Main reason: there weren’t many in the 1890s.) In my case, I simply consulted my GPS and found a short greenway connector that fed into a small neighborhood, on the other side of which was Green Level West Road. Green Level West is a Bike Route (2) and has been granted the power to penetrate Triangle Expressway construction. After 2.67 miles I took a right on White Oak Church Road and a little over a half mile later was on the American Tobacco Trail, the spine of the Triangle’s greenway system.

If you were to pick the most prized recreation real estate in the Triangle — an area with two state parks (Eno River and Umstead), two state recreation areas (Falls and Jordan lakes), and a multitude of top-notch county and municipal parks — it would have to be the ATT. Hardcore marathon runners train on it, so do newbies working toward their first 5K. Mountain bike racers put in miles here to develop their cardio, octogenarians bring their hybrids here for a peaceful ride. It’s one of the few long trails in the region that’s horse friendly. And it’s the most popular walking destination in the Triangle.

Part of the ATT’s allure: It’s pancake flat, or nearly so, built on the bed of an abandoned rail line. Thus, the miles pass quickly, miles on a finely screened crushed gravel surface Wake County), miles on pavement (the Durham stretch north of I-40 to downtown), miles on both (parallel paths in Chatham County). Miles through a maturing Piedmont forest, miles over two old trestles, miles dipping down to, but staying well above, wetlands. It’s easy to find yourself clocking 18 miles per hour with seemingly minimal effort. “Seemingly,” because by the time I’d reached Massey Chapel Road nearly 10 miles later, I was surprised by how quickly I had arrived — and by how tired I was.

The stretch between Massey Chapel and where the ATT resumes at N.C. 54 on the other side of I-40 is the most daunting stretch of missing greenway in the Triangle. It’s less than two miles, but it involves a bridge over I-40, a bridge years in the planning. At last report, Durham had finally approved a design for the bridge, a route had been OK’d and construction was scheduled to begin by year’s end. Supposedly, this missing link will be done within two years. My heat-soaked brain wished it was done today; because it wasn’t, I faced a daunting road detour up busy NC 751, through an industrial complex and across NC 54. I pedaled up to a convenience store at Streets of Southpoint mall, got two jugs of Gatorade and a two-pack of Hostess Cupcakes and asked: What would Frank Lenz do? Would Frank abandon with just nine miles remaining after gorging on too-sweet energy drink and a couple of gooey chocolate cakes?

Of course not. Then again, Lenz disappeared in Turkey never to be heard from again. Couldn’t the same happen braving my way through Southpoint’s treacherous parking lot? I decided I should ease into this new life of a modern day bike explorer: a successful test of the Circle the Greenway concept would have to wait another day.

Preferably one with a temperature in the low 70s.

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It was hard not to. (And drat the telltale look that signals when thought is finally occurring.) It was Monday evening and we were among 30 or so others listening to author David Herlihy recount the adventures of cycling explorer Frank Lenz. Lenz was a Pittsburgh bookkeeper who became caught up in the early stages of a cycling boom that swept the country in the late 1800s. He started pedaling a “high wheeler,” participating in races on dirt (usually mud) roads and tracks that might draw 20 competitors and thousands of fans. Begrudgingly, he switched to a “safety bicycle” — the prototype for the modern bike — when that style began to curry favor. In the meantime, he was honing his skills as a photographer, and in 1892 convinced Outing magazine to back an ill-fated trip around the world. That trip is the basis for Herlihy’s  “The Lost Cyclist: The Epic Tale of an American Adventurer and His Mysterious Disappearance,” and constituted the bulk of his talk and slideshow Monday at Quail Ridge Books & Music.

It would be easy to romanticize Lenz’s worldwide journey on this exotic new machine through lands of which, even in the 1890s, little was known. Easy, if you didn’t listen closely to Herlihy. The roads Lenz traveled were not paved, they were dirt, and often of the loosely packed or wet variety. Lenz’s bike alone weighed 58 pounds, and then there was his gear, which included a 35-pound box camera. Many of the countries he rode through had never seen white people, let alone a white guy on a two-wheeled thing-a-ma-bob. There were no maps for many of the places he traveled. Cash was the currency of the day, and some countries didn’t have paper money: Lenz had to tote weighty coins for long stretches at a time.

This was not cruising paved highways on an 18-pound, 27-gear touring bike with just a change of clothes and a piece of plastic. Still, my face betrayed a lust for adventure.

Beginning in the mid- to  late 1800s and lasting into the following century, a profound sense of adventure had captured the imagination of the masses. In the U.S. alone, the Iron Horse was making its way west, opening vast expanses of territory for exploration, if not personally then through the eyes of adventurers, some financed by magazines such as Outing to lure readers. And this thirst for adventure hardly ended at our expanding borders: Explorers such as Ernest Shackleton, David Lingstone, Percy Fawcett, Richard Byrd, and others were pushing into terra incognita. And then …

And then, it seemed that we’d explored just about everything there was to explore here on Earth. Space was the final frontier, and I don’t know about you but I’ve yet to figure out how to pack for a trip to Canis Major. In fact, though, just because someone else has explored a place doesn’t mean we can’t. Reading about a place, watching a documentary, getting Tweets from out in the field, none of it is a replacement for being there. Great adventures await just out our front door, and that was why I had that look on my face. Riding a bike around the world had already been done: I didn’t have a couple years right now to spare anyway. But there was a local bike adventure I’d been contemplating, one more than three decades in the making that now, with a short detour or two, was within reach.

Riding my bike on greenway from Cary to downtown Durham.

In the early 1980s, a 22-mile rail line running south from downtown Durham into western Wake County was abandoned. Later that decade a plan was made to turn the corridor into a rails-to-trails project, opening the former rail line to a variety of non-motorized traffic. Today, the American Tobacco Trail is all but a bridge (over I-40) and a mile and a half of pavement from being completed. Meanwhile, greenways were popping up elsewhere in the Triangle; as the assorted stretches of asphalt grew in length, someone got the idea that they should become one big ol’ greenway throughout the Triangle — “Circle the Triangle,” the notion was called — with the American Tobacco Trail at its core. Listening to Herlihy and being touched by Lenz’s sense of adventure, while at the same time realizing that I was no Frank Lenz, made me realize that save for about five miles of road riding at the start, I could pedal most of the rest of the way to downtown Durham on greenway, safely segregated from my sometimes inattentive four-wheel brethren.

The next morning around 11, thought turned into action.

Monday: Thought turns into action.

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