Some bicycle trips we made around town

From Fernandina Beach to St. Augustine, down to Shands bridge in Green Cove Springs, and out from the Jacksonville-Baldwin trail to the Georgia border.

Bowden Rd/University Ave to St. Johns County/Shands Bridge

Round trip length: 68 miles.


View Bowden Rd/University to St. Johns County/Shands Bridge in a larger map

It's difficult finding a pleasant and safe bicycle route from the "Southside" (really the east side of Jacksonville; due to being split by the St Johns river, Jax does not have a single southern side) southwards to St. Johns County:

• South of the Bowden Rd (itself not a safe road to ride on) passage underneath I-95, there is no way for a bicycle to cross I-95 and the railroad tracks until Baymeadows and getting to Baymeadows itself requires one to ride much east on Skinner Parkway, all the way out to Southside Ave. 
• There is a road called Salisbury Rd that runs parallel to I-95, but this comes to a dead stop at a church, just short of Baymeadows. 
• US1/Philips Highway, which could be a nice route to St. Augustine, offers no sidewalk or safe bicycle path of any kind. 
• Between Butler Blvd, 9A and US1 there are vast tracts of private land that are all fenced off and offer no roads of any kind. 

So I mapped out a route going south from University Ave, avoiding the main roads as much as possible. A strong drawback of Jacksonville city planning and modern city planning in general becomes obvious:

• All new housing developments are built as loops off of a main road. There is no through passage. This is probably a wonderful way to stop traffic through your neighborhood, but what about bicycles? Can't we have a narrow concrete or asphalt path that connects these communities for pedestrians and cyclists? Can't this be part of the planning? Why are we forced onto busy, dangerous roads?

In one place today, we could have stayed on small roads, but a community had put up a huge fence with barbed wire to stop through traffic, so we had to ride out to two main roads! You can see here how we tried to get through and then had to ride all the way around:

View Bowden Rd/University to St. Johns County/Shands Bridge in a larger map

Once we made it to St. Johns County and crossed Racetrack Rd,  Longleaf Pine Parkway was wonderful. This is a haven for cyclists. Thanks to the stagnation in the big-scale home building that was clearly planned here, there were long wide asphalt roads with very little traffic.We saw lots of cyclists here. It stayed nice all the way until we decided to ride a short bit on SR 16A East. Here the nature of the traffic changed abruptly from modern vehicles to speeding jacked up full size pickup trucks with muffler issues and other off road contaptions, as well as loud motorcycles. In addition, there was no shoulder.

We decided to turn around here.

All in all, it was a nice trip. I'm glad I finally found a reasonable route south.

Technical: New SKF Bracket

I'm installing a new bottom bracket on my nearly 20 year old Dutch commuter bike. The reason is not that the original SKF bottom bracket wore out after all this time, it's that I damaged the old bottom bracket cups when I tried to remove it to install an SKS Chainboard. Because of that some dirt got in and that did cause damage.

Now I'll be able to install the chainboard. I'm getting a slightly shorter bottom bracket, which will also let me replace the original steel crank/chainwheel combination with a nice Sugino aluminum cranks and stainless Surly chain wheel.

Ride from Heckscher Drive to and around Amelia Island.

Today, on January 16th, we drove down Heckscher drive, close to the entrance to Hugeunot Park and from there we rode our tandem to Amelia Island. We stopped underway to have a wonderful sandwich at the Falcon's Nest at the Amelia Island Plantation resort.

We took the Amelia Island Parkway and then rode along the beach on A1A, which was quite nice. We saw some marina's at the north end of our ride, right near Fort Clinch State Park. On the way back we rode through Fernandina Beach and past the airport.

The temperature varied a bit as the sun came and went; it was probably in the 50's most of the time. It probably helped that we did this on a cold winter day, since there wasn't much traffic.

All in all it was a nice ride, about 52 miles total. If we'd gone straight back and forth, we would have had a shorter ride.


View Heckscher To Amelia Island.kmz in a larger map

Ride to the Beaches

Yesterday, we rode the tandem to the beaches. We road down over Beach Blvd, which was a bit noisy and between Hodges and San Pablo there was road construction and it was a bit tricky to find a way through. Jacksonville Beach was very nice, but and Neptune Beach and Atlantic Beach were just lovely, with nice small streets with little traffic. The houses are beautiful and close together. To my surprise there were people on bicycles everywhere. On many of the larger streets, which still didn't have much traffic, we found wide bicycle or multi-use paths separated from the roads. This is how it should be done!

I will go back to the beaches.

Total length of our ride was about 45 miles.


View Ride to the Beaches in a larger map

Weight Loss

I'm losing weight now that I commute to work by bicycle. I weighed 292 lbs. when I started commuting just before the new year. When I weighed myself yesterday I was  271 lbs, so I've lost over 20 lbs, at the rate of 2.5 lbs. per week. If I keep losing weight at this rate I should arrive at my target weight of 210 around the middle of August.

More people should be on bicycles.

New Wheels

Yesterday I got my commuter back, with new wheels. Hub dynamo and drum brake up front, 8 speed and rollerbrake in the back. The bike sounded awful when I rode it, so I spent the night working on it. The original enclosed chaincase just didn't work anymore, so I finally decided to remove it. It's fantastic now. I'm sad to lose the chaincase.

It's difficult to find an enclosed chaincase in this country, where bikes are mainly used for recreation and sport, not for daily transportation. If you have a bike that you ride everyday, rain or shine, deraillers and exposed chains are not practical. They require way too much maintenance and constantly need to be cleaned and oiled. Dirt gets on the chain and rain washes off the oil and causes rust. If you wear pants on the bike, they will be fouled or destroyed.

Enclose chaincases are available everywhere and inexpensive in the Netherlands, but not in the US. You can see some of them at fietspunt.nl.