OWLS Airport Route

We had another good group out for a really nice evening of bike riding. Again Tom R got the group going. We had 21 bikes and 23 riders (two tandems). This was a route that headed out of town to the northeast, so it was kind of slow going for the first 5 miles. One neat switch was that Tom led us over to the B-line trail. We took First over to Morton and from Morton got on the trail and took it up to 7th Street, with a slight kerfuddle at Kirkwood where street work disrupts trail traffic.

The group stayed pretty well together, going at an overall very moderate pace, up to Karst Farm. At that point the tandems decided to take off ahead of the larger group with the aim of cutting a few miles off the route and getting home earlier for other commitments. Another couple of people decided to make their own way home a shorter way.

At that point the rest of us headed out of Karst Farm taking a right on Airport Road. This is a tricky turn, up hill to a stop sign. There was a fair amount of traffic coming in from 45. Thus all but a handful of us had to stop rather precipitously. Some people behind closed too quickly and there was what appeared to be a minor collision. Some lessons: people toward the front need to more actively CALL OUT "stopping"; people toward the rear need to EXPECT that as the group approaches a STOP sign we will actually stop.

Anyhow, most of us went on ahead, seeing no advantage to having 15 bikes stopping there in the middle of the intersection. It was quite a bit later at a subsequent regrouping point that we realized that we were missing three riders, including the two who had collided. We waited a while and even sent one person back looking from the point where we crossed 45. But we never saw them. At least there were three riders together.

From that point on we gradually lost people who headed home their own ways. At the very end just 4 riders went all the way back to our starting point. We averaged about 13.9 overall and about 12.6 on the first half out to Karst Farm. Our average including stops and regrouping time was about 12.1 mph over about 28 miles.