What's Great about Spokane Biking

What I like about Spokane biking is that we have it all: Street, road, gravel, dirt trails, no-trails, and multi-use paths like the Fish Lake and Centennial Trails.  What's really great is I can ride to all these from my home in the Shadle/Audubon area, and I can ride all the varied surfaces in the same ride.

One Sunday in October, I started out on one of my usual routes - Dwight Merkel trail to Aubrey Wright to Bowl & Pitcher, Trail 25/100 to Houston Rd to Mission Rd.  But I needed to stop at REI, so instead of heading to Old Trails, I headed back towards town.  Well, first I had to loop around Deno and Mission twice due to to an incredibly faulty sense of direction.  Follow along here:   Sunday Bike Ride Version 8.9a.

Trail:

Gravel:
well, shoot, this is kinda embarrassing, but I must've deleted all my pics from that day.  That just pretty much ruins the plan for this post, but I'll bravely carry on.

So here's a gravel pic from today:

we've got turkeys, too!

Here's a street pic from mid-Oct:

Ok, enough pics.

Today I headed out again.  From Mission I went up Euclid, thinking I'd take this route, except without the hike-a-bike-possibly-trespassing at the end of Jacobs Rd down to Garfield Rd.  I thought I'd find Garfield Rd, head to Nine Mile Falls or Deep Creek and come back home on the Centennial Trail.  I stopped at the Jacobs/Rambo Rd intersection to check google maps but the resolution wasn't good enough to see the roads.  I turned south on Rambo Rd thinking I'd find Garfield, but instead after a bit I found Euclid and turned on it.  It turned into a good climb.  It didn't dawn on me that I was just going up the same stretch of Euclid instead of down it until I passed a house with a '70 Ford Galaxie 500 in the yard.  It looked just like one I passed on the way in.  Everything looks different while climbing up instead of rolling downhill. I decided to head back home the same way, and not do a loop.  You can see the garmin map here: Sunday Bike Ride Version 8.9k. 

I think instead of turning south on Rambo Rd before Jacobs Rd deadends, I can ride this route: north on Rambo, east on Teepee, north on Craig, to Lincoln Rd, to Garfield Rd and 7-mile Rd and back to Riverside State Park territory.  Maybe next Sunday.