Black Friday in C-Bus

I took a road trip to Columbus, OH to visit my girlfriend and celebrate Thanksgiving with her family last week. Among other things, I convinced her to take a rather lengthy (well, lengthy for her anyway) ride on Black Friday.

Columbus is a relatively bike-friendly city, but my girlfriend lives in this strange cycling black hole of sorts, whereby every bike route near her house is rated as "moderate" or "poor" (denoted by yellow or red lines on the previous link). Despite this, I convinced her to ride with me to a much more friendly area along the Olentangy River, the trail that bears its name. As in, we actually rode our bikes to the trail rather than trying to jam them in the car and driving there. I maintain that doing the latter would have taken us just as much time as the former. It might have been safer, but it certainly wouldn't have been as much fun. In any case, we survived:

If the foliage looks a little out of place, it's because that pic is actually from September, the previous time I was in Columbus. I didn't pause to take any pics on the actual trail this time around, but you can see from that pic and the link above that it's a really nice, easy-going trail. It's a rail trail that bears a striking resemblance to a lot of the trails I'm accustomed to back home, including the D&L Trail. Despite temps in the lower 40's, we'd dressed warmly enough to make it a relatively pleasant ride on an otherwise beautiful late Autumn day:

Our bikes are both made by Specialized. How cute. What's really awesome though is that I got my girlfriend to ride more than 10 miles on a random Friday morning:

Of course, this was only a very short portion of the trail. The Greater Columbus Area (and Ohio in general) are flush with rail trails due to the region's industrial heritage, one that I look forward to exploring more and more as we ride on...