This weekend, Amber and I decided to bike the 30 miles or so to Pocahontas State Park and camp overnight. We planned on making extensive use of their pool facility, though events conspired against us.

We managed to get everything we wanted onto both bikes, without requiring additional backpacks or trailers. Tent, two fleece sleeping bags, change of clothes, toiletries, food, and water. I brought my Garmin eTrex Vista Cx to give us the directions I snarfed using gmap-pedometer and GMapToGPX, loaded onto the eTrex via LoadMyTracks.

I tried to choose a route that would keep us to less-used byways, but I obviously don't know Richmond half as well as I thought I did. River Road (becoming Hugeonot Road) is a major road, heavily trafficked, and with extremely narrow shoulders. Amber was anxious at several points, and we ended up walking the bikes a good deal along this leg.

Bufort and Providence Roads were a bit more bucolic, though still with narrow shoulders.

It wasn't until we came upon Courthouse Road that things got very comfortable. Wide bike lanes almost the entire way to Pocahontas. We ended up deviating from our planned route which would have us skirt the entire eastern side of the park, to come to the entrance along Beach Road on the south, and instead came down an access fire road that fed directly into the park's trails, bringing us out into the main park area by the pool. We still had to bike a few miles to the camp office to check in and find a site, but a few extra miles on forest path beats a few extra miles on paved road, any day.

While we were there, the Richmond Symphony Orchestra were performing a free concert at the Heritage Amphitheater in the park. Once we got the camp set up (remarkably simple as light as we'd packed), we walked down some trails to get to the concert, taking the camera and a light dinner with us.

We got back to camp around 9 o'clock and were preparing for a decent snooze. Not to be had. In efforts to pare down, we chose not to bring camp mats or a thicker sleeping bag. The provided tent pads at the site were shallow beds of pea gravel, convenient for making a smooth place to pitch the tent, but not so convenient for sleeping on. Ow. Furthermore, while it was nearly impossible to sleep with the ruckus of families nearby, once the rain started, the white noise put us right to sleep. The next morning, it showed no signs of letting up.

While discretion might be the better part of valor, a cell phone is the better part of being stranded 30 miles from home in the rain. We waited until a respectable hour, and called our neighbor David to come fetch us in the Pathfinder. A humble end to a new experience, but one I'd do again.