Birthday Bike Ride at Cape Cod

Today is Jeff's birthday! We have a history of taking road trips on Jeff's birthday, it's just something we started when we were first together. I guess it came about because this time of year (especially when we lived in Maine) we both would have cabin fever and his birthday is often one of the first days that actually feels like spring. We'd go for a drive somewhere a little unusual for us and explore. Today, we packed up the bikes and went to Cape Cod!

There is a great rail trail for biking there. We parked at the trail head in Dennis and set off through a scrub pine forest growing on sand dunes. There were some road crossings as we went through villages. Then, there were a number of ponds and cranberry bogs. The bogs are such an amazing color as you can see from these pics.

Sometimes there are overlooks on the side of the path, so you can pause to enjoy the view. Here is Jeff taking a break to rehydrate.

Sometimes, instead of fresh water ponds and bogs, there were marshy areas like this one.

I guess this is a good time of year for construction work on the trails, so some areas were torn up in preparation for repair and we had to go carefully over bumps and gravel in some places and sometimes do a detour altogether. This was a rather treacherous part where the pavement ended abruptly!

We followed the trail all the way to the end which is at mile marker 22 at Wellfleet. It seemed like a good place for pics, so here's one of Jeff.

And one of me!

On the way back the way we had come, we took a detour to Marconi Beach to look at the dunes and sea. There is a nice boardwalk to the beach as you can see in this picture of me.

The dunes are quite amazing here and always make me think of camel or dromedary humps because of the way the tufts of grass grow out of them like hair.

Once we got back on the rail trail again, we took one more detour on a side shoot and biked east almost to the Chatham town line. It was more in town along this stretch and busier.

Finally, here is a picture of my Garmin cycle computer at the end of the ride showing our total distance: 53.56 miles! Yay!!!