Biking on new improved Mt Division Trail

The past few days have been ideal fall weather so my family took advantage of the warmth and sun to do some biking. On Sunday we hit the Mountain Division Trail because we'd heard about its latest improvement project - paving the formerly packed gravel surface - and wanted to check it out.

We started at the Standish trail head at Johnson Field and took the jeep trail (which is still packed gravel) to the rail road tracks where the Mountain Division Trail (and pavement) starts. We had only planned to bike a couple of miles to check things out but it was such a smooth easy ride, before we knew it we were at the end of it at Route 202 in Windham (about 5 1/2 miles).

It had been a while since we'd biked the full distance of this trail and were happy to realize it now extends all the way to the Blue Seal store on Rt 202 (actually if you've got a mountain bike you can tackle a rougher surface path all the way to Bridge Street in Westbrook).

But Blue Seal is a favorite stop for my crew, which is a good thing because we saw a whole lot more of the store this past year buying pig feed. There always seems to be an animal resident there for the kids to visit and depending on the time of year, that animal friend might be a lamb, baby chicks, a bunny or a cat or dog. During my weekly visits to the store this past year I also discovered some very tasty candy caramels at the counter, strategically placed so you can't resist the creamy gooey sweets for 50 cents a piece. Since I've never been able to resist anything with caramel, let's just say I ate a lot of caramel squares this past summer.

So even if my crew needed more incentive than pavement, a visit to the feed store is an added inducement to bike the length of this trail.

Per usual we had our various family antics, from L's biking fashion sense that includes tucking her pants in to her knee socks to Fino's bike "tricks" of skidding and spinning his bike around (and other stuff the girls and I have no interest in emulating).

And when we passed our cross country ski club's "favorite hill" on the way back to the Standish trail head, we commented on how long it would be before we'd be on our cross country skis here. The consensus was that would likely be sometime in November. But based on the recent Indian Summer weather, maybe that's too pessimistic a view for the late fall this year.

Either way though, we still have a few weeks of biking weather in us before we put away the 2-wheels and pull out the skis... or at least I hope we do!


Here's a map of the trail I made with my GPS unit so you can get a feel for the trail.

Mountain Division Trail - 2009 at EveryTrail