Rides past photos - July - October 2008  - Mary Ann cycling in the USA

I spent three months in the USA visiting family and friends in New England and travelling by train across the country to California. I bought a folding Bike Friday, with 27 gears, and travelled only on public transport.

14,000 miles of dismantled railways in the USA have now been made into multi-use trails. This is my brother on a trail in New Hampshire.

From my brother's in New Hampshire, I cycled 30 miles back to where I was staying in Vermont. I used the Ashuelot Rail Trail. Not many others seem to be using it!

This is a bike path along the Charles River from Cambridge to Boston, Massachusetts. There's another bike path on the other side of the river.

"Share the Road" is the slogan being used in the USA to try to make motorists more aware of cyclists and cyclists' right to be on the road. Someone in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, had this bright idea of publicising the slogan in a local park, using plants!

Chicago  has the Lakefront Trail between the city and Lake Michigan.

The Lakefront Trail is more like a cycle highway.

All the local busses in Chicago (and most other local busses everywhere) have bike racks on the front that hold two bikes. I was very glad of this one when the heavens opened and I'd left my raingear behind.

When I was in Omaha, they were about to open this bridge across the Missouri River for non-motorised users.  It is the first time people have been able to get between Omaha and Council Bluffs, the city across the river, without using a car or train (or boat). It cost $22 million.

This chap just happened to cycle by.

These youngsters in Salt Lake City rode by and I asked them to pose for some photographs using their modified bikes.

And again.

The streets in Salt Lake City are probably the widest in the world, thanks to Mormon leader Brigham Young, who insisted they had to be wide enough for a laden ox cart to make a U-turn.  So plenty of room for cyclists.

I used the Wells Fargo drive-through cash dispenser in Salt Lake City.

Canyon Road looking back over the centre of Salt Lake City.

Salt Lake City had the brilliant idea of restricting Canyon Road for cars so non-motorised users have one lane for themselves and the cars have a one-way system on the other lane.

The Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco has a shared path for walkers and cyclists.

Caltrain is a commuter train that runs through Silicon Valley from San Francisco to San Jose.  It has Bike Cars that can be used all day including in the rush hour. This one holds 32 bikes and there are seats in the upper deck for 32 cyclists.

The Pacific Ocean and the coastal Route 1 is in the distance, but I used the Old San Pedro Mountain Road.

It used to be the main road, but closed in 1937. It hasn't been maintained since, so some of it has washed away.

The road reaches Saddle Pass at just under 1,000'.

Skyline Boulevard back to San Francisco.  That's a cyclist crossing over the slip road.  I wouldn't want to cycle on it if it were busy, but on this day there were hardly any cars.

Santa Barbara in California is popular with homeless people who earn some cash by collecting stuff for recycling.  They sleep by the beach.

I used the traffic-free Manhattan Greenway to cycle to the tip of Manhattan so I could look across to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island.

Montreal has some fantastic traffic-free cycle paths running beside streets in the middle of the city, which are very well-used.

This was in the front garden of a house.

Photos by Mary Ann Hooper