July 6, 2022-A multi-trail and under passes ride in the heat, then the heaven's opened up and we got drowned like RATS!! :O

Jo hemmed her sister Katy's dress to fit better so we decided to deliver it back via the trikes. We headed out over to their house using the Rock Island, South Homestead, (Canal) and Sand Creek Trails. I decided to take photo's of the several "underpasses" these trails use for street crossings to show their "condition". The underpass at Circle Dr. was FULL of Water and the gate was closed. It has a very poorly designed drainage system!! Next, the underpasses at both Palmer Park Blvd. and Murry Blvd. are USELESS, full of small boulders, deep sand and debris!! They need to be shutdown and lighted street crossing built, JMHO. The underpass at Chelton Dr. on the Sand Creek Trail is good and the new lighted street crossing on Fountain Blvd., is excellent!

A REAL Problem is the Academy Blvd. underpass on the SC trail, it's been full of homeless and trash, we had to ride around 2 homeless folks ASLEEP on the trail itself and trash!!!!!! The city says it's a POLICE problem, the police say it's a CITY problem, nothing get's done, it's very sad, NOTE: didn't take a photo due to homeless giving us the evil eye as we passed!!! Good news, they are FINALLY getting to construction of the finishing of the Sand Creek Trail to Hancock Expressway and adding a marked street crossing to be able to continue to the Southern Extension, YEA!!!!! The two underpasses on the south SC Trail extension over to Las Vegas St. are clear and very useful. The rest of our ride was mostly on city streets, we went thru the playing fields just off the Pikes Peak Greenway to get over to the overpass at the Harrision Exchange in the pouring RAIN!! We discovered you HAVE to go thru the Harrison High School lot to get to the entry to the overpass so we just found a traffic crossing light at Lake Ave. and Cheyenne Rd. and headed to the Southgate Panera Bread for iced tea. It was raining so hard that the bike lane was totally under water!!! we had to Share the lane with the car splashing us, it sucked!! We were soaked but made it to Panera Bread had our Stevia Spice cookies I baked and iced tea and waited out the very heavy RAIN!! It finally cleared so we headed home via the Tejon St. bike lane and the lovely Weber St. bike lane and were totally dry with VERY dirty/gritty recumbent trikes to wipe down and do a re-oil of the chains, cables, etc. It was a wild day to RIDE!!! 20 miles total sunny, hot, then massive RAIN.