urban bicycle journeys

Yes, I have done this bike ride before.  Bike thirty-five miles from Chapel Hill to Raleigh, take the 3:00 PM half hour $ 9.00 Amtrak from Raleigh to Durham, then bike fifteen miles home to Chapel Hill.    What’s not to like?

I had parked the Bike Friday on my seventh floor stair landing while I pumped up the tires and lubed the chain.

 

I got an early start in order to ride as much as possible before the temperature crept into the middle eighties.

I bicycled the mile from my apartment to the UNC campus, then down the Laurel Hill Road hill.

I crossed over the NC 54 bypass, then through the UNC Finley golf course.

I took a right on the bike path along NC 54, then another right on Barbee Chapel Road.

 

I bicycled a mile or two further, then took a right on Stagecoach Road, and then took a brief left onto NC 751 for only about a quarter mile.

With a right on Massey Chapel Road I accessed the American Tobacco Trail.

 

This paved trail continues south another ten or fifteen miles, but I got off after about five miles, bicycling through a subdivision in western Cary and Morrisville called Amberly.    Much of it is what my friend Tom Constantine calls a “faux-ville”, Georgetownish townhouses here in these exurbs, built on recently transformed cow pastures.

Just a little further on just before crossing NC 55 new apartments are rising up.

 

McCrimmon Parkway ends at the wide four lane NC55.

 

I did NOT bicycle on NC 55.   I jumped across to Good Hope Church Road, which leads to Morrisville-Carpenter Road.    There is a Starbucks at the cross with Davis Drive.  I stopped, got an almond milk latte and sat and read my Kindle.  While these exurbs looked uniform and preplanned the people at this Starbucks were multicultural looking, lots of South Asians and Asians.   Continuing on, Morrisville-Carpenter Road does not have much traffic,  has a wide shoulder and feels pretty safe most of the way.   The NCDOT builds these roads insanely wider than necessary.

This road goes all the way to Morrisville, near RDU airport.   I took a right on NC54, then an immediate left into the Weston Estates neighborhood.   There were large tract houses.

With a couple more rights and lefts I found Dynasty Drive, which along the way changes its name to Electra Drive.    For several miles this street takes a bicyclist up and down hills through Beaver Cleaver residential neighborhoods.

 

Electra Drive dead ends on Trinity Road.   If you take a left on Trinity this leads you into the Raleigh city limits.    Trinity Road is really wide but normally has little traffic.   It passes by the NC State Fairgrounds and Carter-Finley Stadium, home of NC State football.

If a bicyclist takes a right onto Blue Ridge Road and a left on Beryl Road we have made it.  We are actually in the real Raleigh!    The NC State campus is on the right.   I bicycled down Clark Avenue through early twentieth century neighborhoods.  In the area called Cameron Park I had not realized how nice these neighborhoods are.

 

Raleigh is economically booming and lots of people want to live close to downtown.   Clearly some of these people have money.    Near St. Mary’s school these seventeen townhouses are just being completed, surrounded by small circa 1910 houses.  The sign says prices “start” at 1.1 million but a check of the website shows most cost close to two million.

 

 

 

Bicycle riding feels safe and easy in the older neighborhoods of Raleigh, and within its downtown.   There are a lot of new apartment buildings downtown, some with pretentious names.

Among the tall buildings I had lunch at Bida Manda Laotian Restaurant.   It was jammed at lunchtime with trendy looking people who look like they have some kind of trendily important job, most likely in tech.   Red Hat headquarters is around the corner; they were just bought out by IBM.

Chicken fried rice for $ 11.75 seemed a safe choice.   It was only just O.K.

 

 

The restaurant is across the street from Moore Square park.   The city just spent a bunch of money re-doing the whole park with a seeming objective of making it less full of homeless people.   The re-do is quite nice and the few homeless looking people on the benches do not seem to detract from the public space experience.   I sat in a spot in the shade and read some more of The New Yorker on my Kindle.

 

The train to Durham was scheduled for 3:00 PM.   At 2:30 I bicycled over to the new Union Station, about five minutes away.    On the way, near the station in the warehouse district I passed the newly opened two-level Weaver Street Market, named after the street in Carrboro, thirty-five miles away.   There is finally a grocery store downtown.

I arrived at the station in plenty of time.   The new Union Station is a beautiful facility.

 

In the first minute of the train ride it passes right in front of the state prison.

 

The intra-North Carolina Amtrak trains have a baggage car space where you can hand them your bicycle, no extra charge.   I arrived into Durham in half an hour, no problems.

The bike ride back home to Chapel Hill from Durham was also no problem.   This has never been a particularly pleasant bike ride.   It has gotten much better just this year when Old Chapel Hill Road was repaved and widened with a bike lane.