piranha | first bike outing (Reply)

so today we took the new bikes out for our first ride away from home. and it was great! we were going to hemer park originally, but when i got to cedar road, i remembered that when playing with google earth i had looked at the nanaimo river estuary, and that there was apparently a road from cedar leading right into it. for some reason i had always thought raines road just went into a native reservation. which it does, but it also leads to a small parking place that gives access to the estuary and its marshes, complete with a lookout. so on impulse i suggested we drive down that road and see what it looks like.

that was a good idea. the estuary is beautiful back in there, and while we're too late for spring migration, this is obviously a place to come to in fall as well. and we found wild asparagus! there wasn't much opportunity to ride the bikes inside the gated area, but this'll be great to come back to with rubber boots and binoculars. saw a bunch of killdeer. i think some of the area was probably once dyked for pasture; we saw what looks like the remains of dykes, though not really high enough. maybe they have been destroyed to allow the water to flow more naturally again.

when we got back home i went back into google earth and plotted the path we took. :)

note to the *poing* -- the peninsula to the right is duke point where we walked all the way up to the tip.

estuary ride
4.7 km round trip, along most of raines road, and through the gate into the estuary itself. (clicking brings up 300k large version of image.)

raines road was a perfect ride -- almost entirely level, and just enough distance to get all the unused muscles to start working. i think we're gonna also try for the nanaimo side of the estuary; we went there once last year starting at the campground and got a little lost trying to bushwhack our way out to cedar road, but i can trace a map of the path network off google earth.

note to self; interesting land use information: integrated land management bureau special initiative nanaimo estuary.

(hrm. lj's auto-formatting seems to be broken.)