Conquer Your World https://bikingconquest.com Wed, 02 Jul 2025 13:27:57 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9.4 Coastal Coffee and Pastry Run https://bikingconquest.com/coastal-coffee-run/ https://bikingconquest.com/coastal-coffee-run/#respond Tue, 01 Jul 2025 14:04:52 +0000 https://bikingconquest.com/?p=237 This is where it began in 2020. I wanted to go on a run, but it was too hot to get motivated to do that. I also wanted to go get some coffee, and thought it would be nice to bring some pastries back to the family from a favorite little coffee shop a few […]

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]]> This is where it began in 2020. I wanted to go on a run, but it was too hot to get motivated to do that. I also wanted to go get some coffee, and thought it would be nice to bring some pastries back to the family from a favorite little coffee shop a few miles up the road. Suddenly a brainstorm: there were bikes in the shed, and biking would not only be a good replacement exercise in the heat, but a good way to get up to the coffee shop relatively quickly. I strapped on a drawstring pack and went on a coffee and pastry run. When I got back to the house, I had decided I was definitely pulling my old bike out of storage when I got back to Carrboro. I've been riding several times a week ever since, and I can't wait to start finally mixing rides into some other adventures.

Coastal Coffee Run

  • Hooper House
    Lat: 35.539481365872 | Lng: -75.474030375481
  • Beads and Beans Coffee, Rodanthe, NC
    Lat: 35.5878364 | Lng: -75.4682853

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]]> https://bikingconquest.com/coastal-coffee-run/feed/ 0 Two-Wheeled Time Machine https://bikingconquest.com/time-traveling-bikes/ https://bikingconquest.com/time-traveling-bikes/#respond Mon, 30 Jun 2025 18:45:24 +0000 https://bikingconquest.com/?p=194 When I started biking in Greensboro, I never really thought it would turn into an almost daily activity once I moved back to Chapel Hill. After all, I had my running community, my knee would surely recover fast (right?), and I didn't really like to ride in traffic. But it didn't take long for me […]

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]]> When I started biking in Greensboro, I never really thought it would turn into an almost daily activity once I moved back to Chapel Hill. After all, I had my running community, my knee would surely recover fast (right?), and I didn't really like to ride in traffic. But it didn't take long for me to discover several things:

Traffic isn't as scary as I thought, as long as I ride safely, use my eyes, obey (most of) the rules, and pick ride times and destinations sensibly.

My (almost) daily route now is through our neighborhood to the University Mall area, where I connect to a greenway at the Community Center that takes me all the way into some neighborhoods in Carrboro, where I come out a hop and a skip from Gray Squirrel Coffee Company.

Gray Squirrel is a place with lots of memories for me over the past half decade. I first started going to Gray Squirrel regularly shortly before the pandemic started in 2020. In the Fall of 2021, when they were opened back up and just being careful about it, I started to walk our dog there daily for love and attention from baristas and neighbors.

When we moved to our new house across town in Chapel Hill proper, I quickly began to miss my mornings at the Squirrel. But thanks to my newfound interest in biking, it wasn't long before I realized that I could easily bike there and back in just about an hour total, and suddenly the Gray Squirrel was back in my life on an almost daily basis, and suddenly Carrboro didn't feel so far away anymore...

The Oaks to The Squirrel

This is a map of the route I ride from my house in Chapel Hill to Gray Squirrel Coffee Company in Carrboro several times a week in the mornings.

  • Nottingham House
    Lat: 35.9310445 | Lng: -79.0049054
  • Burning Tree
    Lat: 35.915721352272 | Lng: -79.015157818794
  • Dickerson Court
    Lat: 35.927255261547 | Lng: -79.034271240234
  • Tanyard Branch Trailhead
    Lat: 35.917441770893 | Lng: -79.065299034119
  • Gray Squirrel Coffee Co, Carrboro NC
    Lat: 35.9104964 | Lng: -79.0681575

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]]> https://bikingconquest.com/time-traveling-bikes/feed/ 0 Getting on The Bike https://bikingconquest.com/guilford-to-tate-street/ https://bikingconquest.com/guilford-to-tate-street/#respond Mon, 30 Jun 2025 16:58:35 +0000 https://bikingconquest.com/?p=149 Thank you for joining me on my Biking Conquest! For the last several years, I've gotten into biking around town a lot for alternative exercise. I hadn't gotten on a bike in almost ten years when in 2020 I decided to go for a bike ride at the beach instead of a run in the […]

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]]> Thank you for joining me on my Biking Conquest! For the last several years, I've gotten into biking around town a lot for alternative exercise. I hadn't gotten on a bike in almost ten years when in 2020 I decided to go for a bike ride at the beach instead of a run in the awful heat. That inspired me to pull an old 2008 Gary Fisher out of my shed to ride around on town. A few years later, when caring for my parents in Greensboro NC while my mother was sick and my father had fallen, I tore my meniscus. I couldn't drop everything and get surgery so I just stopped running, and the impact this had on my body was awful. A few months in, I finally had the good sense to just go out and buy a decent road bike to ride around Greensboro: a Trek FX3 from the Greensboro Get Outdoors Pedal and Paddle Trek bike shop. I started riding from my parents house on the west side of town by Guilford College into downtown to the Tate Street Coffee Shop near UNC Greensboro's campus. This not only turned into a really fun and healthy replacement for running while I allowed my knee to heal, but I think it sped up the process by adding movement without the same level of impact.

My mother passed away that April, but thankfully my father made was seems to be a full recovery, and I was able to move back to Chapel Hill most of the time and just visit now and then. Back in Chapel Hill, I started to miss my bikes to downtown Greensboro, but soon discovered that I could safely ride from from our house in Chapel Hill to my favorite coffee shop in Carrboro, where we used to live. I do it 4 to 5 times a week now.

Discovering my love of riding for exercise collided with my wanderlust a couple of months ago when I started to fantasize about where to take my next vacation, and decided that I might like to start factoring bicycling into future travel adventures. That is what led to this website and the project behind it. I intend to plan bike-friendly trips around North America - and eventually abroad - and will document those adventures here and on social media as they unfold, in the form of routes and locations that I will keep organized on this WordPress website.

Without further ado, I present to you my first regular route... They'll get longer and more interesting as we move forward.

West Greensboro to Tate Street Coffee

  • 2 Holly Crest Ct, Greensboro NC
    Lat: 36.0934098 | Lng: -79.914027
  • Lindley and Auburndale
    Lat: 36.086069254132 | Lng: -79.897041320801
  • Western Guilford Middle School
    Lat: 36.081746976952 | Lng: -79.896671175957
  • UNCG Fountain
    Lat: 36.069351085097 | Lng: -79.810191392899
  • Tate Street Coffee House
    Lat: 36.0689347 | Lng: -79.8056314

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