The lures of free sangria

That's it. I'm thinking about putting my foot down. No more biking to Prairie Moon.

Now, Prairie Moon is a local winery that has live music most Sundays during the summer. You can bring snacks, you can't bring drinks, and they sell their own wine, sangria, some beer, and pizza. The cover for Sunday is $3 and you get a complimentary glass of sangria... which they normally sell for $4, so really it's like they force you to buy a discounted glass of sangria. The horror.

Anyway, once a month they have "Cycle Sunday," meaning if you bike to Prairie Moon, cover is free. Including that glass of sangria. Considering I'm already a snobby biker, I don't need a whole lot more motivation to look down my nose at car-driving folk.

Except for one thing: there is no good way to get to Prairie Moon on a bike.

The first time I went, I convinced David to come with me since Mom and Dad were off doing something else assuredly less fun. And he would get in free and I would drink his sangria. Everyone is happy. So, using our phone navigation system's bike option, we maneuvered around north Ames a bit and then hit a bike path parallel to George Washington Carver Ave. And then it pulled an Ames on us and dead-ended with no warning and we had the options to either backtrack a ways to the last intersection or go through the ditch to get to the road. It had been raining and the bottom of the ditch was squishy, not that we could see it cause it was one of those unkempt or "natural" ditches and over our heads with grass.

So we made it to George Washington Carver Ave and were forced to ride as far to the edge of the road as we could, which wasn't far as the only shoulder it had was gravel, and in turn force people to go around us.

So next time I decided to bike, I used Navigator to find a different path. It too looped me through a bit of north Ames before directing me to some part of Ada Hayden that didn't have a paved path. I biked on something between crushed rock and gravel for a bit before it turned me on a path that had been gravel in a past life and was working hard on covering that fact up with foliage. Which led me to a gate I had to walk around out on to a gravel road called Grant Ave which was really loose in some spots and really bumpy in others. And a hill. I couldn't bike on the edge of the road because my bike would slide. Which in turn dumped me onto 190th street. At least that has a decent shoulder.

This time, I'm like, "It wasn't that bad." Though I did wear a helmet this time. Well, on Bloomington Road, they tore up the bike path from the four way stop all the way to Stone Brook and I had to ride on the road there. I stopped for a car on Grant Ave and with the gravel could barely get moving back up the hill. I started thinking about making my peace with God.

So, until somebody bothers to make a bike path from Ames to Prairie Moon, it doesn't seem like a very good idea. Not for free sangria, anyway.