It's all gravy...

I can tell it's the Labour Day long weekend here in Ottawa because today is the last of the Sunday Bike Days. I had done two trips since my last entry but those were pretty much the same trips I had written about previously so I didn't see much point in writing more of the same.

I might as well have written "ibid".

What I decided to do instead was collect my trips into one blog posting that would feature me achieving my goal for the year - to trike no fewer than 300 kilometres in a triking season.

The triking season here is quite long, often well into October, so the fact that I met and actually exceeded my goal by the end of the Sunday Bike Day season is just an interesting coincidence. I will still be triking next week and, indeed, for as long as the good weather holds out.

Our original plan was to simply do the regular route up to where Hog's Back meets Colonel By, zoom the 15 kilometres to the end of the route, turn around and then head back. I actually only needed to do precisely 30.0 kilometres today in order to meet my goal. However, when we got to the far end of the route, a quick check on my trip odometer showed only 14.6 kilometres. The last thing I wanted for me today was to pull back into our driveway only to be 800 metres short of my goal. That would have annoyed me to no end. So, we decided to "purchase a little insurance" by adding a side junket along the Laurier Avenue dedicated bike lane. It would prove to be a very good idea.

It's not difficult to connect to the Laurier Avenue bike lane - at least, not from Colonel By. It was a simple matter of starting our trek back from where the original route ends and then hopping onto the Corkstown bike/pedestrian bridge. Crossing the Rideau River, we found ourselves deposited onto the west side of the bike path that runs along the side of the river itself. A few hundred metres later and a quick left put us right onto Laurier Avenue and the dedicated bike lane.

We sailed along the bike lane getting all the green lights for the first half of our "side junket". Once at the end and just shy of where Laurier Avenue meets Bronson Avenue, we quickly turned around and headed back to re-intercept the west side of the bike-path-along-the-Rideau. Another quick left put us back onto the Corkstown bike/pedestrian bridge and then a smooth slide back onto Colonel By.

By this time, the road was noticeably busier, but then, it was later in the morning so I expected to see more cyclists, roller bladers, strollers, joggers and dog walkers. The rest of the trip was fairly uneventful...until...

I needed for my trip odometer to get to precisely 30.0 and I reached that point on the corner of Southmore and Rankin, well past Mooney's Bay.

The picture with this blog was taken where Colonel By meets the Convention Centre (what Adam calls the dead mackerel and what Rachael calls the pineapple grenade). Yet, I made that very same gesture when I met my goal.

Tally for all three days was 59.7 kilometres done.That's 3.4 kilometres of gravy.