For the second time, the Senior Cycling and Gourmet Club did the remote Fox River Ride. Taking the train from Union Station to downtown Elgin, we follow the Fox River downstream to Aurora with sight seeing stops in St. Charles, lunch at Atwater’s in Geneva, and a final push to Aurora for a train ride back to Union Station. At least that’s what is supposed to happen in theory.
The total route is just over 23 miles depending on side excursions. Although it is a net downhill ride, there are two relatively “breath taking” climbs before the lunch stop.
Despite a few clouds and a chilly start, it turned out to be a beautiful day for a ride along the Fox River. As usual it was a bit slow for a start with the array of biological stops and band aid applications.
The part of the path that washed out a while back has not been repaired, so we followed another portion of a trail and a few local streets before picking up the trail again near the Railroad Museum. My new Garmin GPS seemed to be working.
Group photos in St. Charles and lunch at Atwater’s in Geneva at noon and everything seemed to be working ok. We had detoured around the washed out path and successfully rejoined the route and made it to Geneva.
After lunch I hurriedly left so that I would be able to take a few photos on the final leg to Aurora. My GPS was new and I was inexperienced in using it to navigate. It seemed a bit off so I re-entered the routing to go from “Current Location” to “Aurora METRA.” Little did I know that “Current Location” was a generic name for the location where I was when a certain obscure button on the device was pressed several days earlier at DuSable Harbor in Chicago, not Geneva, Illinois as I mistakenly assumed. Yes, we would get to Aurora METRA but first the GPS wanted me to get to the Current Location, a long, long ways east of our real current location.
Thankfully some better minds prevailed and we asked for directions. The good news is that we changed what was a 23 mile ramble into a 35 mile cardiovascular exercise.
The hydration stop before heading back to Chicago was all that more satisfying.