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We had just biked into New Bedford, Mass. – about halfway through our cycling trip from Cape Cod to Connecticut – when the sidewalk on the bridge abruptly ended.
There was a Jersey barrier to our left. And then there was an off-ramp. And then there was a highway.
That was the way we had to go, my biking companion and fellow sports reporter Pat Eaton-Robb insisted.
I looked at the highway. Then back at Pat, who works for the Associated Press in Hartford. He was in charge, he was the navigator, he was the guy who had the heart attack in April who wanted to prove he could do things like ride a bike 200 miles in four days while trying to find rail trails and connect up parts of the East Coast Greenway on our journey.
We were as far from a rail trail as we possibly could be at this moment.
“No,” I said. “I’m not going on that road.”
We found stairs. They led to another, safer, road. It was through the city but it wasn’t awful. We kept going.
We had started July 12 in Wellfleet at the tip of the Cape Cod Rail Trail, a 22-mile paved bike path with ice cream stands and cranberry bogs. We finished 212 miles later on the Air Line Trail in Columbia, where Pat lives. He had biked in Alaska and Ireland. I had never biked more than 50 miles in one day. But I was curious, too – how much of the East Coast Greenway could we ride? How could we get from trail to trail? The East Coast Greenway runs from the Canadian border to Florida but only 32 percent of the greenway is on protected bike paths and we did not follow the greenway the entire time, although we tried.
Who knew there were bridges in Rhode Island you weren’t supposed to cross with a bike? That’s what the police officer who stopped us on the other side told us. But he let us go on our way.
Day 1: Wellfleet to Bourne, 55 miles
If I was going to get a flat tire, the Cape Cod Rail Trail was the place to do it because we never saw another bike shop. It happened 20 miles into the trip and luckily, two miles from the Dennis Cycle Center.
Before that, we found Nicole Taylor and Stefan Domenikos from Spaulding Adaptive Sports Center, with a center for adaptive bikes for people with disabilities next to the trail.
“This gives us an opportunity to get people back cycling,” Taylor said. “We worked with a man who had not cycled for 50 years and we got him back on the rail trail again. It’s nice to give those people the opportunity to do what they used to love to do.”
We used Route 6A to get to our next trail, the Cape Cod Canal Bikeway, but the 18 miles on 6A was a cycling nightmare – a twisting narrow two-lane road with no shoulder.
“We always tell long-distance cyclists that this is a route in development,” Lisa Watts, East Coast Greenway communications manager, said in an email. “At this point, 32 percent of the 3,000-mile route is on protected bike paths. The rest is on roads, as you experienced – everything from quiet back roads to busy four-lane roads. In recent years, we have been growing the greenway at a rate of 30 to 40 miles a year, spread across the 15 states.”
We made it in one piece to the canal trail, an 8-mile path, with fishermen and cormorants for company, as we cycled toward the Bourne Bridge.
Day 2: Bourne to Providence, R.I., 73 miles
So there are bridges you can and can’t (or maybe shouldn’t) cross with a bicycle.
Bourne Bridge – bike path.
Sakonnet River Bridge in Rhode Island – nice bike path.
Mt. Hope Bay Bridge in Rhode Island – doable, if you have a death wish.
Going over the Bourne Bridge wasn’t bad but trying to exit and go around the rotary – I mean, that’s hard enough in a car, never mind a bike. But we kept following the Google map for bikes on Pat’s phone. The East Coast Greenway has a map, which Pat used, but it’s not a GPS map so we mostly relied on Google while biking and as a result, we strayed off Greenway-recommended roads occasionally.
Mattapoisett was the next bike trail we found, a 4ish-mile paved path that dumped us into New Bedford. New Bedford had streets with cobblestones (quaint, for sure, but impossible for a road bike to navigate). That’s where we ran into the bridge that ended with a Jersey barrier.
“To your question of whether anything is being done to move the greenway off road (you didn’t like the cobblestones in New Bedford??) – yes, but it takes a long time,” Watts wrote in the email. “Creating a mile of greenway costs an average of $1 million (more if bridges and/or wetlands are involved) and can take anywhere from 10 to 20 years or longer. The timeline includes initial advocacy, planning, applying for funds (most often federal transportation funding), design and construction.”
We found Route 6, which quickly turned into a multi-lane road with big box stores. It was mentally draining to ride with the traffic and we longed for the peace of the rail trail. But the next one was the East Bay Bike Path in Bristol, R.I. and we still had to cross two bridges.
The Sakonnet River bridge was lovely. The Mt. Hope Bay bridge came up quickly. There was no shoulder. There was construction; we were able to get behind some Jersey barriers and walk our bikes on the narrow walkway. At the top we had to manhandle our bikes over some construction equipment and when we finally got the bottom, a police car pulled up behind Pat. The officer told us that we shouldn’t have crossed the bridge; that there was a bus that could have taken us across with our bikes. The officer let us go and at dusk, we found ourselves on the East Bay Bike Path, with 15 miles to go to Providence, where we spent the night.
We had tried to avoid Fall River but Watts said the greenway stays further to the north in that area and there were bike-friendly options to cross bridges there.
Day 3: Providence to Plainfield, 40 miles
Rhode Island is one of the Greenway’s “showcase” states (along with Connecticut), with the highest percentage (63 percent) of the trails complete. And the East Bay Path is the most popular with restaurants and ice cream shops along the way.
So not surprisingly, more than half of our day in the state was spent on bike paths – the Washington Secondary Path and the Trestle Trail.
“Roads are dangerous,” said Steve Harrington of East Providence, who was biking on the Trestle Trail. “People are distracted with their phones. If you get in a crash on a road, it could easily be catastrophic. If the paths are available, people will use them. I’m on the East Bay Path all the time and it’s very popular.”
Day 4: Plainfield to Columbia, 44 miles
We biked about 20 miles on the road from Plainfield, where we stayed the night, to the Air Line Trail in Pomfret. It was the first non-paved trail we encountered on our trip and a hybrid bike is necessary.
The Air Line Trail currently goes from Thompson to East Hampton.
We arrived in Columbia mid-afternoon on Sunday – 3 ½ days after we started. We rode 96 of our 212 miles on rail trails. On the roads, we were tense and stressed. On the trails, we rode side by side and talked and relaxed.
We see signs for “No More Bike Paths” but there are those who don’t want us on the road either. So where do you go? You look at Cape Cod’s Rail Trail, which is a tourist attraction, with signs pointing to restaurants and ice cream shops and bike shops off the trail and wonder if that could be done with other trails in other states.
“We’ve seen it in community after community – once it’s built, people use it for exercise and recreation,” Watts said. “It’s good for public health. It’s good for the environment. It gives people a transportation option rather than driving to do an errand. There’s bicycle tourism – and bicycle tourists spend money – they want to eat locally, stay locally, spend money locally. And property values for homes within a mile of a trail always increase because people see that as an asset.”