Area Spotlight: Eastern Trail

This is my first post highlighting the wonderful things about where I live in Southern Maine!


I'm starting with the Eastern Trail, one of my favorite places to ride my bike, walk my dogs, look for turtles, and practice photography.  Last summer it was my favorite place to fish, also.

The Eastern Trail is 65 miles with some beauty scenery.  It goes all the way from Kittery to South Portland.  It's usually well traveled, but never too busy, people walk their dogs, jog, run, go cycling, and even ride horses down the trail! 

The trail does follow some roads in certain places, but it's fairly well marked, and easy to follow.  I can easily ride my bike 6 miles out and back in under two hours because most of the trail is fairly flat.  The many trails going into wooded areas off the main trail are nice for walking, too, though a bit more muddy with a lot of roots making it hard to ride through.

My favorite place is a little path into the woods off the main trail that connects to the Milliken Mills Pond, where I find several different species of turtles, frogs, fish, and birds! It's an area full of wildlife.


A couple of animals that live there are the usual, chipmunks, grey and red squirrels, painted turtles, wood turtles (I believe, though I'm not a turtle expert), garter snakes,  largemouth bass, pumpkin sunfish, and many many birds, there are also bigger animals, such as deer, and raccoons.  According to the lake survery I found we even have eels, and a couple types of catfish in the pond.

Some people enjoy kayaking or canoeing on the pond, though it's not the most popular activity on this section of the trail.

"Ralph" the Painted Turtle.

One section of the trail also crosses the Scarborough Marsh, that is my other favorite section.  The marsh is next week's spotlight, so I won't go into any detail today!

The trail's website.

Only one of these pictures has been edited at all.  These are not pictures from my Instagram, most of the pictures on my Instagram are edited in some way.  All of my photography is currently taken and edited on an iPhone 4S.

Why I Want to Bicycle Around Europe

Originally, I planned to road trip, backpack, or hitchhike Europe.  There's only one reason that I decided to bike instead:

Sexism.

Let me clarify, nobody says that females cannot drive, backpack, or hitchhike around Europe.  They don't allow women in the Tour De France.

One of my goals was to ride in the Tour De France, I have never watched the Tour De France, and I didn't know much about it, but I wanted to race in it.  I didn't care if I won or not, obviously.  Then, when I started reading about it, I found out that only men are allowed in the race.

To adventurous girl this came as almost a shock, I thought that cases of sexism like this only happened on a small scale in certain places, but a famous race?  The biggest bike race there is?  Really?

Here's a pretty good article about the subject.  The comments are really worth reading as well.  Personally, I believe that if we can't be in the men's race that we should have our own at least, but as mentioned in the article, not as many people would watch, and sponsors would be harder to get.  That's a problem in my opinion.

Perhaps the only reason I care at all is because I'm still upset that I can't race in the Tour De France.  I do intend to do as many races that I can enter as possible.  If more women riding is the way to get our TDF then I'm in!

I'd say most little girls in America learn to ride a bicycle, I don't really know about other countries, but I'd hope that it is the same most places.  If it is, then why is there a problem of fewer female cyclists?  Assuming the same number of girls learn to ride bikes as boys (which is a pretty big assumption I know), the same number of girls should be encouraged to ride as well as the boys, then there wouldn't be a problem with this.

So I am going to bike around Europe in my own mini-protest of sorts.

Hope for humanity?

  I just finished a movie called 13 Sins.
  It makes you wonder, "what would I do for money."
*Spoiler alert*
  In the movie the main character is given 13 tasks for a grand total of over six million dollars.  He doesn't know what the next task is until he completes the one before it.  At first they're simple "kill the fly", but by the end they're much, much more difficult "kill a family member".  The "game", as it's called, is to prove that anyone can be corrupted when enough money is involved.
  The outcome is different.  The main character changes his mind after challenge 10 or 11, but he's already in too deep.  He's gotten a few million already, but if he backs out it all gets taken away, which is why he took it as far as he did.  He was getting married, had a baby on the way, a mentally ill brother to take care of, and had just lost his job.  When they started asking for murder he couldn't do it.

  How many people would go for it?  How many would complete the 13th challenge?  Maybe they'd justify it in their own minds somehow, after all, some police officers are in on it, they erase everything if you win.  All you have to deal with afterwards is a guilty conscience, that's if the experiment fails.  Since the goal is to transform you into a terrible monster of a person you shouldn't even feel guilty afterwards.
 
  Personally, I wouldn't have been able to do the second challenge "eat the fly you just killed", even for $3,000, so I wouldn't even have to get to the worse ones.


Update on my bike riding.  I did over 6 miles today in just under 40 minutes.  Bam.  That's with hills and everything, I'm considering going along the flat trail that I plan to bike next summer and just going for 30-45 minutes one way, and then back.  We'll see.


Sorry for the lack of posts for the last few days, I'm occasionally a busy person.

Bicycling

Yesterday I was reading about some mountaineering workshops, while I was reading the requirements I noticed that physical requirements were being able to carry a 60 lb backpack up 4,000' in elevation.  60 lbs is over 50% of my body weight, and I've never actually climbed 4,000' in elevation at once.   Knowing I can't do this I started looking into fitness training for preparing to climb.

The plan I found to begin with is 3 days a week after 30-45 minutes of cardio, and 2 days of weight training, with the weekends off.  My plan is to use bicycling as my "cardio".  

Since my list includes riding in the Miner's Revenge bike race in MI I figured using cycling as exercise now will help with that.  I also plan to "thru-bike" a 65-mile trail nearby next summer.

Starting with riding my bike three days a week, and at least six miles a day (I'll increase that gradually) hopefully I'll be ready to do my thru-bike, and it'll be good exercise! At least until is starts to snow, and then who knows... So I have until October or November, and then from April until July to be ready!