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.