Didn’t know there was deep sea diving in Rolesville, N.C., out on the edge of the Piedmont, did you?
Indulge 90 seconds of your time for a little fantasy, out at Fantasy Lake.

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Monday — never an easy time for the outdoors enthusiast. After a weekend of adventure, returning to the humdrum work-a-day world can make one melancholy. To help ease the transition, every Monday we feature a 90 Second Escape — essentially, 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 not under a fluorescent bulb.
Today’s 90-Second Escape: Six-Foot Vis

Our instructor was trying to put a positive spin on the situation. “It’s going to feel good when you get in the water today,” he told us at the start of our two-day open water scuba diving certification course. “The water temperature is between 80 and 84 down to 33 feet, and the air temperature” — he stopped to consult his multi-functional dive computer — “is 68.”
What’s the visibility? a classmate asked. This is where Dennis Zullig with Gypsy Divers of Raleigh put on his dancing shoes. After a long pause, he came clean.
“It’s between zero and six feet,” he said, then without adding a beat, added, “But you know, if you embrace the etherial aspect of it, with the swirly green and milkiness, it’s pretty cool.”
In scuba diving, it’s all about visibility — the distance you can roughly see before things start getting cloudy. 40-60 feet is considered good offshore North Carolina, visibility in the Caribbean can top 100 feet. The greater the vis, the more there is to see.
But as it turns out, our tap-dancing instructor was right. Seeing stuff up to 40 feet away is great. But not seeing it until it’s right on top of you is pretty cool, too, as today’s 90-second escape illustrates.

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The latter was perhaps the most surprising find. Marcy and I had set out to take in spring at the Franklin County Nature Preserve south of Louisburg. Along about Rolesville we detoured to Fantasy Lake, to see what was up at the scuba diving center of the Triangle. (People were diving — in 47-degree water, albeit with 30- to 40-foot visibility.) On the way back into town, we saw some Adirondack chairs outside a furniture store, stopped, and two hours later emerged with a new coffee table and dining room table. (Don’t ask.)

By now, the sun was thinking about calling it a day; We needed a smaller diversion than Allen de Hart’s lush nature preserve. On the drive into town we noticed a small park off US 401. A quick walk, we thought, maybe check out the playground. We didn’t expect Main Street Park’s small street-front presence to yield a 35.9-acre nature preserve with a mile and a half of paved trail.

“The park opened in two phases,” Rolesville P&R Director William Leonard told me later. The front part — the gazebo, the playground, the picnic area and a quarter mile of trail — opened in Spring 2005. The “back section” — with a mile and a quarter of paved walking trail meandering through the woods — opened recently.

What makes Main Street Park unique is the mile and a half of paved, 8- to 10-foot-wide greenway that winds through the woods. The “back” trail passes exposed rock face and under a maturing canopy of hardwoods and pine. There’s a funky pond (and funkier critters nearby), picnic rocks, a large picnic shelter (that could double as a rollerskating rink and, if you’re hankerin’ for a full-body workout, a retro par course. At times we had no idea where we were, then realized it didn’t matter since we couldn’t be more than a holler from civilization. I kinda like being lost when I know it’s not permanent.

Main Street Park excels for two user groups. It’s one of the best handicap-accessible trails around in terms of getting into the woods and not just close to them. And it’s perfect for little ones on trikes and small bikes: They get a sense of exploration and discovery on a smooth, tot-friendly surface.

The best thing about Main Street Park is that it’s part of little Rolesville’s (population 2,844 as of 2008) big Open Space and Greenways Master Plan. In a nutshell: parks director Leonard says the Main Street Greenway will link with a mile or so of existing greenway at a nearby park on Rogers Road and the new Heritage High School on Forestville Road. That, he says, will be as much as 5 miles of greenway, greenway that will connect with emerging greenway in nearby Wake Forest. Much of the Rolesville greenway is being funded by housing developments going up in the area. (The downside: with the recent economic slump and resulting housing slump, it’s hard to say when this greenway will be completed.)

Eventually, Leonard says the plan is for the Rolesville greenway to connect with Raleigh’s greenway system somewhere along the Neuse River corridor. Raleigh recently began construction on that 28-mile trail, which the city plans to have done by 2014.

But there’s no need to wait until Rolesville hooks into Wake Forest, Raleigh and the Triangle at large. Main Street Park offers plenty of escape now.

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