{"id":2529,"date":"2010-05-09T23:48:52","date_gmt":"2010-05-10T03:48:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nuxx.net\/blog\/?p=2529"},"modified":"2010-05-09T23:48:52","modified_gmt":"2010-05-10T03:48:52","slug":"w-c-wetzel-state-recreation-area-via-richmond","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nuxx.net\/blog\/2010\/05\/09\/w-c-wetzel-state-recreation-area-via-richmond\/","title":{"rendered":"W. C. Wetzel State Recreation Area via Richmond"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Being Mother’s Day<\/a> I headed over to Richmond to visit my parents. Being a nice day I wanted to get in a bike ride as well, so I combined the two deciding on W. C. Wetzel State Recreation Area<\/a> as my destination, as I’d never heard anything about it before and it supposedly has trails. I figured that I would ride there, check out the trails, then head back.<\/p>\n

Save for the steady, strong winds out of the north\/west<\/a> and the disappointment of the rec area this was a fairly nice ride. It turns out that this is a quite small\/flat area consisting mostly of grass and gravel<\/a> trails surrounding a few ponds in a low-laying piece of typically flat southeast Michigan farmland.<\/p>\n

This rec area has odd signs at the trail entrances, some indicating “No Wheeled Vehicles” and others saying “No Motorized Wheeled Vehicles”. I made a point of entering at the ‘motorized’ varient of the sign, did one casual lap of the trails (roughly a mile or two) then headed back to the roads to check out the radio controlled aircraft field further down the road at the park. This ended up being a quite nice place to visit, as it had super-clean portable toilets<\/a>, nice benches to sit on, and a man to watch as he flew an RC helicopter.<\/p>\n

After a brief break to eat a bit<\/a> (I’d only had two bowls of cereal and two bananas to this point today) I headed back to Richmond, taking a slightly different route due to some dogs that I encountered\u2020<\/sup> on the outbound route. This slightly different route involved 30 Mile Road, one of the many east-west grid roads here in SE Michigan. This one, contrary to what Google has to say, actually is broken in two pieces with a supposedly-out bridge<\/a> in the middle. It turns out that the bridge (located here<\/a>) is this one from HistoricBridges.org<\/a> and is very much passable<\/a>, but only to foot and bicycle traffic. It’s an old wood surface bridge<\/a> that I wish I’d spent more time looking at, as it supposedly has quite-rare stone abutments.<\/p>\n

Not far beyond the nifty bridge I actually got stopped by a train<\/a> (CN 8802<\/a>) at a crossing. With the train traveling particularly slow (~25 MPH) I could have very safely crossed the tracks it if I went around the gates, but I thought it’d be neat to watch the train go by. Unfortunately this train took a bit more than five minutes to pass, so I spent quite a while just standing at a gate watching chemical tankers, wood haulers, car carriers, and steel coil cars pass by with cars stacking up behind me.<\/p>\n

The ride after this point was very uneventful, with me taking a quick trip through downtown Richmond<\/a> then back to my parents house, where I found my mom having brushed and fed Roxie, who I’d brought along with me. We had pizza for dinner, talked a bunch, and then I headed back home right as my dad was laying down to sleep before a midnight shift at work.<\/p>\n

\u2020<\/sup> Two Rottweiler<\/a>s who started running towards me and barking. I quickly sped up before they got anywhere close, and didn’t slow down until I could no longer hear them. Having no ready dog defense (OC<\/a> or ammonia in a squirt gun<\/a>) I took a different return route to avoid actually meeting the dogs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Being Mother’s Day I headed over to Richmond to visit my parents. Being a nice day I wanted to get in a bike ride as…<\/p>\n

Continue readingW. C. Wetzel State Recreation Area via Richmond<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2529","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cycling","category-family","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nuxx.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2529","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nuxx.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nuxx.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nuxx.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nuxx.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2529"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/nuxx.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2529\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2532,"href":"https:\/\/nuxx.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2529\/revisions\/2532"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nuxx.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2529"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nuxx.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2529"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nuxx.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2529"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}