Last night Night Girl followed the link at the bottom of yesterday’s post, Barack the Boat and got lost in the political blogosphere until who knows when.  So this morning Bike Girl was slow to get going.  In the summer when it gets hot as the day goes by, waiting until the afternoon would be bad.  Now that the weather has gotten cooler, waiting until the afternoon to go biking is actually desirable.  So at the crack of noon we drove across the Mississippi to the Land of Lincoln and Obama. 

OBTW, I got an email from Obama this morning, thanking me for helping him raise $150M in September.  Hey Barack, no problem!  I would have lost it in the market by now anyway.  Dan canvased for Obama this afternoon.

Getting back to today’s bike ride, Madison County Trails has converted over a hundred miles of railways to bike trails.  The interconnected trails can be permutated into combinations that lead to hundreds of miles of different bike rides.  Today we strung the Schoolhouse, Goshen and Nature trails together to make a 26 mile loop.  We started in Collinsville, journeyed north to Edwardsville, headed southwest to Horse Shoe Lake (an oxbow lake) and then east back to the car.  We mainly passed through cornfields, with combines on the prow.  We also biked through eleven tunnels.  Afterwards we late lunched at Culver’s.

For wildlife today we saw four cats, a hawk, swan, egret and ducks.  The trail was littered with Osage oranges, walnuts and locust pods.  Shrubbery identified included poke weed, stag horn sumac, honeysuckle and sassafras.