Cycling Heaven
Easily one of my favourite days so far this year. I'd been cooped up working for too many days, so today I packed a lunch, strapped on the camelback, and rode off. Destination: Colony Farm.
Colony Farm is in Coquitlam, and used to be the farm worked by residents of Riverview Hospital, a very old mental health facility. Patients performed "therapeutic work" there, and apparently they bred prize Herefords as well. The farm supplied the food for the hospital.
Now it is a wildlife habitat, allowed to go back to marsh and other habitats, and is absolutely beautiful. Swallows and redwinged blackbirds everywhere, a silo and other old buildings allowed to rot (and house wildlife in the meantime), meadows, creek, big old trees...I will definitely go back and explore some more. 14km circuit around the farm.
It was such a warm, sunny day, and riding felt so good, I didn't stop there. I stumbled upon PoCo trail, a 25km flat gravel trail that follows the dykes up Pitt River. It was probably not as nice a ride as it will be by the end of the summer. There is a heavy snowpack, and the weather is warmer than it should be, so people are worried the rivers will flood this year. So the dykes were all in the process of being raised, which means more gravel, less green.
However, I really appreciate all the native plants that have been planted in some areas or allowed to flourish in others. It was a truly beautiful ride with the big river on one side and poplar, clover, and tansy on the other. Bird sightings (besides the swallows and blackbirds): bald eagle, grey heron, green heron, and yellow-headed blackbird. And one redwinged blackbird that beeped! Very strange.
And to cap off the day, it had apparently been yard sale day in the Queens Park neighbourhood, just a couple of blocks from the co-op. I missed the garage sales, but rode past in time to scrounge through all the boxes of free stuff left behind. I found a few treasures that will probably make their way into our next yard sale.
Total ride: approximately 75km.