Here's another one that I'm significantly behind on updating. To add to it, this one has been 2.5 years in coming. I started the Cross County Trail with Casey and his little brother in the summer of 2013. The trail winds from Lorton, VA all the way to Great Falls Park via a conglomeration of different trails, paths, and sidewalks. It's about 40 miles in length and we decided to do it in a day. This might have been a feasible plan, had the trail system been easy to follow, had we all been in good biking shape, and had I not known that two days later, I would be in Arizona attempting to hike into and back out of the Grand Canyon. As it was, we finished about 30 miles of the trail before I pooped out and decided to call it quits.
Finishing the trail proved to be a challenge. This was in part due to the trail itself, but even more because it wound up being just short of impossible to find a sunny day when Maxwell's high school schedule, Casey's customer service, "work a good chunk of the weekends" schedule, and my "oh my god, grad school is consuming my life" schedule aligned. By happenstance, it took a full year and a half until we managed to get ourselves back to Raccoon Ridge Court, where we had originally called it quits. We had made the last three criteria align, but alas, a sunny day was too much to ask for, so we set out in the sleet. Unfortunately, a year and a half was enough time for all three of us to forget which direction we had come from and which direction we needed to go. And so, for three solid hours, we biked back and forth and back and forth until we had biked what felt like ten miles and gone nowhere, with no more of a clue. This was our own stupidity, I can promise you that, but even still, after three hours of biking nowhere, we were cold, grumpy, and soaked to the skin. We told ourselves we'd try for a different day.
That day came a few weeks ago. It was still a bit brisk and quite muddy, but for the winter the weather was mild and most importantly, our schedules aligned. One year was not enough time to make us forget the disaster of the last attempt, and so we did our research and determined our trajectory before embarking on the third attempt. We returned to Raccoon Ridge Court (I don't think I'll ever forget the name of that street) and headed in the direction that we now knew to be correct. Two hours and ten miles later (albeit with a few turn arounds), we arrived to our car in Great Falls, muddy, but so glad to finally cross this one off the list.
If you decide to bike this trail, it would pay to bring the map that you can find
here, but also to download a better map to a cell phone or GPS. The map that I linked is primarily what we used, but it is not detailed enough to give good directions when you reach an intersection with no trail marker (a common occurrence). In parts, this trail is extremely well marked, if not a bit overmarked. At other parts, the markers are scarce and not present at all trail junctions.
Finishing the trail proved to be a challenge. This was in part due to the trail itself, but even more because it wound up being just short of impossible to find a sunny day when Maxwell's high school schedule, Casey's customer service, "work a good chunk of the weekends" schedule, and my "oh my god, grad school is consuming my life" schedule aligned. By happenstance, it took a full year and a half until we managed to get ourselves back to Raccoon Ridge Court, where we had originally called it quits. We had made the last three criteria align, but alas, a sunny day was too much to ask for, so we set out in the sleet. Unfortunately, a year and a half was enough time for all three of us to forget which direction we had come from and which direction we needed to go. And so, for three solid hours, we biked back and forth and back and forth until we had biked what felt like ten miles and gone nowhere, with no more of a clue. This was our own stupidity, I can promise you that, but even still, after three hours of biking nowhere, we were cold, grumpy, and soaked to the skin. We told ourselves we'd try for a different day.
That day came a few weeks ago. It was still a bit brisk and quite muddy, but for the winter the weather was mild and most importantly, our schedules aligned. One year was not enough time to make us forget the disaster of the last attempt, and so we did our research and determined our trajectory before embarking on the third attempt. We returned to Raccoon Ridge Court (I don't think I'll ever forget the name of that street) and headed in the direction that we now knew to be correct. Two hours and ten miles later (albeit with a few turn arounds), we arrived to our car in Great Falls, muddy, but so glad to finally cross this one off the list.
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