Highlands/Superior Street

What would have been last Friday if I had gotten around to posting this on time, David and I hit the trails again. It was my birthday and a great way to spend it. We loaded the bikes up in the back of my truck and hauled them up to Parkview Christian. After layering on the bug repellent, we hopped on the Highlands trail. It was the perfect time for a ride as the sun was on its way down and the evening was settling in. We took the southern part of the loop first and before we knew it, we were passing the swimming pool and golf course. It took hitting the north point of the Highlands to figure out that we had missed our turn, so we backtracked and picked the trail back up.The northern edge of the loop follows through the backyards of residences. The families out playing combined with the up and down of the hills made it great ride, but David had to warn me a few times to slow down. Once again, we failed to catch our turn and wound up taking the longer ride that follows 1st Street back to the closing of the loop. From here, it was only a couple miles to the Superior Street Trail.Okay, I like to ride by bicycle and I like saving on gas even more. So, more often than not during the summer I ride my bike to work. Better than two-thirds of my ride is near traffic, and I have this to say about it: it's unpleasant no matter how you cut it. The vehicles are loud. You get to constantly inhale exhaust fumes. Traffic is not exactly eye candy. Most of all, riding beside (and sometimes in front of at intersections) can be dangerous due to the sizes and speeds of the objects involved. All of that was to aid my point that I think it was a rather poor idea to place a recreation trail along Superior Street, a four lane consistently busy main street of Lincoln.
The most fun part of the ride was between the Highlands and 27th Street because it was mostly downhill. After that, it was quite flat and monotonous. I wore a sleeveless shirt hoping to tan my upper arms, but even that sun beating down on our backs didn't really put a dent in the white part of my farmer's tan. The trail runs all the way to the intersection of Superior and Cornhusker where we sat and I regained some energy. At this point, I hadn't eaten in several hours and it was starting to catch up to me - especially since I just ran out of water.

We backtracked again (this time it was planned) to around the 33rd Street area and took the south leg of the trail. This part was pretty. We were away from traffic, along the creek (curse those bugs...) and had some trees and grass to look at. It's a neat area. As a reference, we were straight north of Menards, which we eventually found of course as we hit 27th Street at approximately Fairfield.
The truth of the matter is, we blew it again. We aimed to take care of all those northern trails in one night, but we didn't realize that the tail went all the way to Cornhusker Highway. Instead, we took Fairfield over to 14th Street, south to Adams, west to 1st, and back north to the Parkview Christian parking lot. We saw a lot of residences and some pretty steep hills, at least as far as Lincoln is concerned. Incidentally, I ran completely out of energy somewhere back near 27th. Fortunately, David was carrying his Nature Valley™ granola bars and the day was saved once again. Those things are seriously delicious, but then again I was famished.

So yeah, we did 17. 5 miles by my little odometer and rode the whole thing in about an hour and a half. Good times.

DAVID adds: For the record... I forgot it was Tyson's birthday (I guess his present was a granola bar), TYSON's map was not very accurate (that's my story and I'm sticking to it), Tyson forgot his camera (In case you didn't notice). That is all.