The bicycle tour of Trenton is an enveloped tour on the streets through the city, in 2007 the tour was
advertised as 15 miles, but ended up less than 13 miles. As with most city tours the pace was slow
with various pauses to allow the lagging riders to rejoin the lead group. The ride had a Pre-registration
fee of $5, with a "day of" fee of $7. The 2007 tour had a theme of Trenton restaurants, although I don't
know how much this influenced the tour route, much of the ride was on neighborhood streets, some good,
and some not so good.
The tour started at the Katmandu night club adjacent to Mercer County River Front park; home
of the Trenton Thunder minor league baseball team. Katmandu is very easy to get to as it is on route 29,
and there is a traffic signal allowing direct entrance from both direction of route 29. The safety
envelop was maintained by two very busy motorcycle policemen (who did an excellent job!) that
stopped traffic at key intersections during the ride.
The ride started out on the sidewalk which runs between the river and the stadium before climbing
a ramp to the route tunnel-park. The route 29 tunnel-park was interesting, and as a tax payer I
tried my very best to get my money's worth from the $115 million spent on this project during
our brief ride through the empty park. The park itself has a series of gates or arches that
seem to chronicle the history of construction from early man until today. The east side of the park
does provide a nice view of the Delaware river, while the west side has a not so great view of row houses,
after exiting the park we ran a loop through Riverview Cemetery to allow the stragglers to regroup.
From the cemetery the tour entered the streets of Trenton where it made it's way to George Page park
where a rest stop was setup, while at the stop riders were treated to a short concert of folk music
from group of musicians, while munching on trail mix, and fruit. After the rest stop the tour route
headed near downtown, but never made it to the capitol. Here is a map of
the entire route from my GPS.
After the tour we racked the bikes and headed up to the D&R canal path at Washington's crossing to
ride another 14 miles for the day.
