Weekend Rides: Sugarland Trail

An unlikely place for a Bookcrossing.

I decided to check out the Sugarland Run Trail for my first geocaching bike trip. I did the section from near the intersection of Elden St and Herndon Parkway until about 0.3 of a mile from the Leesburg Pike. I was hoping it would be bike trailer friendly, but it seems that Paul will have to wait until he's old enough to make the grade C column stream crossings. Those are tricky enough with just me, since the concrete tends to get really slimey and you get stuck with swamp stink for the rest of the day if you fall in.

I only had one mishap with those. A little girl wasn't paying attention and ran out in front of me as I was crossing. As I tried to swerve around her, I hit a really slimey patch and slid into some briars. No one was hurt, aside from the swamp stink. The swamp stink is so bad that Jack even gave me a "WTF? These smell horrid!" look upon inspecting my socks when I got back. Jack loves the smell of sweaty socks and dirty diapers, just to give you an idea of how offensive the swamp stink is.

I was glad I had my GPSr with me. Otherwise I might have never gotten back to my car. There are quite a few spurs and parallel paths in the park, and the intersections all start looking the same after while. After a few wrong turns, I decided to follow my tracks back to the car. I was pretty surprised I did 10 miles today. I guess all those wrong turns do add up.

The terrain was pretty hilly and the paths left a bit to be desired at times, so I thought I maybe did 7 or 8 miles. I did pretty decently on my geocaching, finding 4 of the 7 caches I set out to find today. One was too busy, one wasn't accessible from the trail like I thought it was, and the other was a plain old DNF because I couldn't find a good place to park my bike.