Start: 7:46 AM

Finish: 3:32 PM  

Saddle Time: 5:51

Ascent: 468 feet

Descent:  424 feet

Miles: 77

Total Miles: 3,148

Highlight: The first 30 miles was mostly bike lane with some dedicated bike path.

Lowlight:  Realizing I probably took the wrong route into the city yesterday.

Cyclemeter:  Follow this link to see the data I’m collecting with the cyclemeter app. You can see gps information, speed, elevation, distance, cadence and heart rate. Better viewed on a computer where it’s easier to play around with the graphs.

Good ride today. The weather continues to cooperate with dry weather in the 80’s. I followed bike path and bike lane along the lake and out of the city for a good 30 miles. It was a very different experience from yesterdays ride when I wondered why Cleveland didn’t do a better job with bicycle infrastructure.  I was probably just on the wrong roads.  Perhaps if I followed the northern tier to Lake Erie west of Cleveland I could have rode into the city on some of the same trails and bike lanes I rode out today.

I started with a really nice hotel breakfast.  Yes, those two words are usually not used in the same sentence but this was restaurant quality food: eggs, bacon, biscuits, and sausage gravy plus the usual continental fare. I really like this hotel but I’ve been staying in Super 8 and Motel 6 so my standards are pretty low.

I wondered what todays ride out would be like.  I really didn’t want a repeat of yesterday with many miles of sidewalk riding in the suburbs. I much prefer riding busy streets in the city. Google and the northern tier overlap for most of today until I defer to Google later in the day making my way more inland to my hotel in Conneaut. The route follows the Cleveland Lakefront Bikeway for about 10 miles. I joined the path at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, would have been nice to visit but I didn’t have time.

The bikeway is on a combination of dedicated bike path or very quiet side roads that make their way through old estate neighborhoods. It was very nice riding. I noticed one of the houses was for sale so I looked it up on Zillow. For $1.1 million you can get a 7 bed, 5 bath, 6,200 square foot house on the lake just miles from city center. While a million dollars is a lot of money, in northeast metropolitan areas it will buy you not much more than a normal house.

After about 10 miles the bikeway ended but bike lanes continued along the lake.  I say “along the lake” since that’s where I was but the lake was out of view, hidden behind houses. Most of my lake views were early on closer to city center. Once out of the estate neighborhoods I rode through areas with shops and apartments in old 2-3 story brick buildings. I’ve only seen a sliver of Cleveland but I like what I see.  Everything looks clean and well kept.

I saw signs for something like the “Ohio Lake Bikeway” but right now I can’t find any information online.  Regardless of name, it seems to be a bike trail that follows roads along the lake which is probably why I rode on so much bike lane. 

Eventually I  left the shore and headed inland towards my destination in Conneaut. While the town is on the shore I’m staying in a motel just off the highway several miles inland. Today was very different riding from the last couple weeks.  While I’m still seeing some corn and soybean fields they are quit rare.  What was once farmland  are now housing developments. The terrain is more rolling hills with many more trees than previous days. I often thought the area looked a lot like New England.

My motel for tonight is Oyo which was a Day’s Inn years past.  My northern tier map shows it as a Day’s Inn. While it’s likely a chain, I’ve never heard the name so I went to Google.  Apparently Oyo is an Indian company which is interesting because I’ve noticed once out of the all white northern plains most motels seem to be owned and/or operated by south asians. I haven’t traveled much within the US for a while so maybe I missed this trend or maybe it’s just regional.

The location is just an exit off the highway several miles from the actual town so there’s nothing here except for two truck stops.  I don’t want to ride the few miles into town and back so dinner tonight is truck stop food and a couple tall boy beers.