Happy Happy

Yesterday was my 49th birthday.  What did I do?

I went for a ride with Mills and Colin, had porch beers at 10:30 AM, knocked out the grocery store with The Pie, visited my mom, and then came home and got a bunch of shit done around the house.  Oh, I put some flat pedals on my beer getting/wheelie practice bike.

My weekend leading up to yesterday was good enough that I didn't feel all that bad taking it easy and piddling around the house.  We went up to Charleston on Friday.  What can I say?  I'm enamored by that city.  We were headed up to meet The Boy and his wife and loan him his sister for the weeks leading up to the birth of the child that will essentially make me Grandpa Dillen (or something like that).

Anyways, while in Charleston, of course... I ride.

Instead of using ride time to drive all the way over to Kanawha State Forest where I've ridden probably about ten times now, I opted for a more in-town trail system, Little Creek Park.  Google offered a "bike route" to get there, and despite it being on roads labeled "highway" and "turnpike," I went with it.

Suffice it to say, the ride sorta sucketh.

A semi-harrowing journey to a point I found on Google street views to get to an entrance to a trail that when I told my local friend Birdman that I was entering here, he replied, "that stretch doesn't get much use and is usually mud holes."

He was correct.

Regardless, I ride in on the north end of Trace Fork, which was more renegade ATV trail than anything else.  Eventually, I get into the "trail system," and somehow manage to get on Damn It Ball Field Trail.  At the top, there is a kiosk and a woman who is asking me about the trails.  I tell her "good luck," and from what I'd seen so far, that it was a spider web of short trails with little to no trail markers.  I did find the paper maps tho, so I hand her one and head back into the woods.

The analog map offers up some info that isn't on Trailforks, and so I decide to look for longer loops and also the red trails because they were labeled "Steep Trail.  May not be bikeable."

Which sounds perfect to me.  One one trail, another... then somehow back on the same trail I already rode earlier...

Sigh.  Short unmarked trails and Trailforks getting GPS confused on my location and almost no phone signal and a paper map with trail names that don't all match up with Trailforks... another sigh.

I'm running up short on the time that I'd promised The Pie I'd be back so we could go eat something.  I still had to ride the "highways" and "turnpikes" back to my hotel, but I want to see some red trails tho.

I seek out Boiling Springs because it looks like it should be at an obvious trailhead.  I enter into a disc golf course, run into some "golfers" I'd talked to earlier about stuff and things, descend some more but it doesn't seem as gnar gnar as described, traverse over to Cave Trail, giant tree down, crawl over, the rest of the trail is grown over... impassable.  Hike back out.

Shit.

Traverse some more trail looking for Devil's Tea Table.  I think I've found it to my left, look up and right...

Obvs I've found it.

It actually is the business, but it's super short, and the fun is over just like that.  I'm super down low elevation-wise.  I kinda put a route back into my head, tuck away the map, and then make the unfortunate decision to take the southern portion of Trace Fork (again?) to get out of the woods.  It's more ATV trail and portions of it make long, shallow angled crossings of a wide creek.  At times, the trail just is the creek for hundreds of feet.

Meh.

I miss a turn off this infernal stretch and commit to going even further away from where I want to be.  I end up way the hell out in the middle of farm country, surrounded by no trespassing signs.  My phone kinda knows where to go... and I'm now way further than I'd ever planned on being from the hotel and unbeknownst to me, a shit ton of steep Costa Rica-like steep climbing away from my original route to get here.

At least it's an "adventure," I guess.

I manage to get back around the time I intended (somehow), clean up, go eat an unfortunate but convenient meal, and then spend the rest of the evening with my immediate family watching the free concert on the riverfront... an event that is just awesome.  Every.  Single.  Time.

Wake up the next morning, ride along with The Pie as she does a five mile running race that also starts across from our hotel (same place as the concert), breakfast with the fam, and back to Charlotte for my big birthday "celebration."