Neshaminy, PA

by Bryan on July 9th, 2007

One thing about going on rides in Pennsylvania or for that matter anywhere in New England is that you need to have lots of spare change for the toll roads. This particular ride cost us $4.50 round trip, plus gas. Allen and I drove about 50 minutes north east of West Chester and headed out to Neshaminy, PA to meet up with Evomo Sponsored Rider, Ray Zeimet.

When a bike ride starts out the night before with a couple late night phone calls getting some sort of scribled notes on where to find the trail head

Actually I need to back up in my story. The night before I had a couple phone calls with Ray and Jake to coordinate this mornings ride. Unfortunately, Jake couldn’t join us. He did give me a few extra notes on where to find the trail head. So the next morning I had a few little scraps of paper with notes scribled down like, turn right at the Langhorn Speed Shop and look for the construction site. I have to wonder if having to have clues like “look for the water towers by the football field” foreshadow that the ride will be awesome or miserable.

We’ll with those notes, we got with in a few hundred feet of Ray and his car. We just were on the opposite side of the fence. We ended up parking at the Neshaminy High School and heading out behind the Football Field. Next thing you know we were immersed in Pennsylvania forest and tight and twisting single track.

200 feet into the ride, I was having trouble shifting. I jumped off my bike and took a look at my rear derailur cable which was totaly slack loose. I traced it down to the rear derailer and found that it had snapped. Uggg. Ray, Allen and I took a look at the problem and ended up looking it into place so I was now pretty much riding a single speed full suspension bike - something that I am not used to all.

Of course this trail was chock full of roots, log jumps (hops), wood plank ramps, rock gardens and mud. The mud was not to bad - it just added the extra slippery quality for sliding over the log hops.

This particular trail we were on is one of the race courses for the Mid-Atlantic Super Series MTB Races. The shop Guy’s Bicycles hosts this race. It was definitely a very technical course. Lots of stuff to power through and keep your balance on. Ray told us how a mini-tornado swept through the area and trashed a big section of the course leaving trees down everywhere. A bunch of guys came out the day before and cleared the course so the race could go on.

We also had some friendly forest critters to guide us on our way including a box turtle which I almost took for large rock that I was going to jump off of and a young deer just a few feet off the trail watching us as we rode by.

Towards the end of the ride, we got to ride across Ray’s handy work - a wooded plank bridge about 8 feet long or so. Very nice actually and Ray described to us how him, his kids and a couple friends came out and built it a day. Very cool!

Well I have to say this was another fun ride - definitely more challenging and technical than the other rides I have done here in PA, but overall - great!