This morning I woke up at our house in Chapel Hill and hopped on the new Surly to bike to my friend Ed’s apartment, which is on the way to the Bolin Creek Trail entrance at the Chapel Hill Community Center. Together, we biked down the trail until we reached MLK Jr Blvd / Airport Road, and north a couple of blocks until we got to the drive that leads to an entrance to the Carolina North Forest trail complex. Carolina North is a complex set of trails with over 25 miles of single-track and gravel/paved paths, and I’ve loved running there for over 12 years now.

I rarely do the Pumpkin Loop, which is a gravel trail encompassing a number of the smaller trail systems in the forest, because when I run I prefer the single-track dirt trails. But now that I was on my new gravel bike, I absolutely needed to check it out. The bike performed as I expected. My tires were probably a little overinflated for what I was doing (gravel over road), but I still felt stable and comfortable throughout the ride… a pleasant improvement over the bump high-pressure road tire ride I’ve been used to on the Trek FX3 that I’d been using for my point-to-point commutes (and that I still love).

After we finished the Pumpkin Loop, we biked back towards the Bolin Creek trail, where I took a right to continue over to our old house in Carrboro to work for the day, and Ed took a left to get back to his aparment start his own workday.