Guus Bosman

Last Sunday I spent pretty much the entire day on the bicycle. I did the Great Washington Bicycle Loop ride, a route around Washington and many of the suburbs.

It was pretty cold, but very sunny. The first half of the route was on the Capital Crescent trail, which I had done before, basically going north to Bethesda. I'd never seen Bethesda before, but didn't spend a lot of time there, and continued the trail.

In Silver Spring I got some bread, cheese and milk and I had lunch in the Sligo Creek park. At one point in South-West D.C. my clue sheet told me to leave the Sligo Creek trail, but I took a wrong exit, and within 1 minute bicycling I arrived in a really bad neighbourhood. Not just shabby, but it seriously scary, with broken down cars and a lot of unpleasant folks on the street. I quickly turned around -- it's easy to forget that Washington has some really bad neighbourhoods.

On my way back it was really cool to approach Union Station from the north, although traffic was pretty crazy there.