Stop by the Eco Building of the State Fair this Friday at 2:30 if you want to learn a little more about the bike trails of the Twin Cities. The 40 minute presentation will cover the major bike trails of the city and show how they can be connected to form loops or act as car free commuting corridors. I’ll hang around after the talk to discuss the trails with anyone who wants to learn more.
This morning’s Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has a front-page article about the growth of interest in bicycling in Milwaukee. You can read it here: Milwaukee keeps rolling on path to being bike friendly. The city plans to paint more bike lanes and, on roads that are too narrow, add “sharrows” that indicate cars and bikes must share the roadway.
Other Milwaukee news: a ground breaking is planned for Thursday, August 30 at 9:30 am for an extension of the Hank Aaron State Trail in the direction of the domes. Hank Aaron is expected to attend. It will be held at Valley Passage (where the trail crosses the Menomonee River and a side trail goes south to the new branch of the Urban Ecology Center (opening in September) and the Wisconsin Bike Fed offices.
It was only a matter of time before someone put them all together into an event. In this case three events over three weekends in September. The Root River Trail will be celebrating a Taste of the Trail. Each community along the trail will include its own growers, producers and restaurateurs, offering complimentary samples of their products. Fare will include the famous pies of Whalen, Lefse made on a wood fired stove, a Norwegian favorite rommegrot, jams, jellies, honey and more from local farmers and a hearty breakfast of pancakes, sausage and scrambled eggs.
Bring your bikes and log some miles. you will need the appetite.
Dates for the multi-weekend event:
For more information click here.
The Sabo Bridge, on the Midtown Greenway in Minneapolis, will be closed for a week starting at 7:00 pm Sunday, August 19. A new retrofitted diaphragm plate will be installed on the bridge. The old plate failed and caused the supporting cables to break loose, causing the bridge to collapse. Bicycle and pedestrian traffic will be detoured to the intersection of East 28th St and Hiawatha Ave.
The bridge closure isn’t the only disruption to the Greenway. The city is sand sealing and doing maintenance on the entire trail to protect the surface and make it last at least another 10 years. The sand sealing closures will continue until the entire trail is finished.
Met singer/songwriter Brianna Lane at the 46th St Block Party yesterday. Vicky was carrying a prototype handbag made from the 2008 Twin Cities Bike Map and Brianna was studying it in detail. She wasn’t thinking handbags, however. Her thoughts had moved to a dress. Specifically, a dress for Interbike 2013, the bike industry’s biggest annual gathering in Las Vegas. She is booked for a gig at the event.
Brianna is no slouch on a bike. The bike is her main form of transportation and in September she leaves with Peter Mulvery on a bicycle/music tour through the back roads of Wisconsin. She travels 60-100 miles per day and still has energy left to play her gigs in the evening. Previous music/bike tours have taken her as far as Boston.
By the end of the night, Brianna had enough maps to create a dress, with a few extras to cover for any problems that she may encounter in designing and sewing the garment. She promised to send a picture of the map dress.
Around 1970, Wisconsin was the first state to map out a bike route crossing the state: the Wisconsin Bikeway that ran from LaCrosse to Kenosha, and later to Racine and Milwaukee. But then it dropped it. This inspired me to start the Wisconsin Bicycle Routes site, for fear that the good long-distance routes would gradually become a distant memory.
On this site, I posted the cue sheets of the bikeways. After completing research for the update of the Milwaukee and Southeastern Wisconsin Map, I decided it would be interesting to take a look at how much of the original route would stay the same. While the route in most of the state is still a good one, in southeastern Wisconsin, there are better roads in some places: less busy and more direct. I suggest alternative routes on the site.
What do you do with old bike maps? We thought these would be more fun than recycling them into lawn furniture. Check out the beverage cozy and the wine bag. They make the perfect post-ride accessory.