Day 32: Baltimore to Havre de Grace, MD

We entertained some horses just outside of Monkton, MD, after leaving the beautiful Torrey Brown Trail.

Today was a long (68 miles) but fun day of riding, offering the full range of scenery from urban to suburban, trail, and rural. We left Baltimore early, the morning cloudy and chilly. Very quickly the Greenway took us through Druid Hill Park on the Jones Falls Trail, a huge urban park and a pretty way to leave the city.

From the park the streets morphed from working class urban to suburban. Traffic was busy with school dropoffs but we usually had a bike lane or wide shoulder, nothing I take for granted these days.

Speaking of suburbia, I was studying the Greenway map last night and nearly gasped. There, just a mile or so from our route north of Baltimore, was the Lutherville neighborhood where I lived for junior high and a year of high school. So Dee indulged me and we added a few miles to go see it.

Amazingly, after 44 years the houses still looked the same. Someone added a screened porch to the back of our Clearfield Circle house, otherwise it looked just the same. Standard split-level in a standard late 60s development plopped down on a former horse farm.

The best thing: the gravel bike path I remembered behind our house, the former carriage lane to the old farmhouse, is still there. It’s paved now, a proper greenway. In those awkward junior high years, my bike was my escape and that path was my escape route. It’s funny to think of it as my first greenway.

The bike path behind my old house in Lutherville

We rode on still north, then turned east and came to our favorite segment of the day: the Torrey C. Brown Trail, a gorgeous stone-dust path on the former Northern Central Railroad line. The Greenway follows seven miles of the nearly 20-mile trail, much of it following the Big Gunpowder Falls river. We didn’t want to leave; the riding was peaceful and the sun was starting to break though clouds and the tree canopy above us.

Dee at mile one of Torrey Brown Trail

The rest of our afternoon was mostly rural and rolling as we headed east to Havre de Grace. The horse farms and fields were some of the prettiest we have seen. We appreciated whenever the sun broke though the clouds to warm us a bit, although climbing a few of those rolling hills also served to warm us.

We have ended our day on the outskirts of town at a Super 8. I felt quite sure a Subway would be close at hand for dinner, for Dee, and it was, plus Dunkin Donuts for decaf latte afterwards. So someone’s a happy camper tonight!