The Almeida family has moved to Raising Maine. They still will be exploring Maine's outdoors, creating crafty projects and casting chickens in homemade videos. But you will see it all in their new blog.
Thank you Pati for the bike trail recommendation last month. We finally found some time when the weather was cooperating to make the trek over to Brunswick to try out the Androscoggin River Bicycle Path.
The trail was smooth without many hills and the bike lane was wide enough to accommodate the girls' occasional swerving because they are still novice bike riders (they learned to ride about a month or so ago) and are working on their steering correction technique.
Of course the reason for L's swerving is usually because she's looking everywhere but where she's going (yes mom, I know I did that too).
But her wandering eyes came in helpful for a stray caterpillar that had wandered onto the trail.
She had to 'save' the caterpillar from being run over and used a leaf to coax him back into the grass.
After the tree-eater rescue we continued on our way and before we knew it, we were at the end of the trail in Topsham.
We all thought those 2.5 miles flew by.
At the Topsham trail head there was a small pond brimming with frogs. I was surprised we heard the croaking over the highway traffic noise and airplanes flying overhead (it's not a quiet nature trail). But we did and were rewarded with many frog sightings and their croaking songs.
We found a quiet, grassy spot for a snack on our way back to Brunswick and after eating, L. demonstrated her bike hand signals for a poster she's making about bikes for her 4-H project.
Left turn signal
Right turn signal
The girls gave this trail an enthusiastic two-thumbs up! If you've never tried trail bike riding with your kids, it's worth the effort to dig out the car bike rack and load it up. And if your kids are like mine, they'll be beaming at the end of the day when they realize they rode 5 miles and passed through two towns in a single afternoon.
Mike is correct about the hand signals, except that on a bike there is no reason to not point in the direction that you are turning with the hand that you are turning with.
Hand signals come from early automobiles that had no turn signals. The reason that you use your left hand at a 90° angle to signal a right turn is because people's arms were not long enough to reach out the passenger side window and a following driver would be more likely to not notice a signal if you had a passenger making it.
As evidenced by the confusion in the pictures above, not everybody is familiar with turn signals from the early 20th century, and the original reasons for hand signals don't really apply when you are on a bike. You are much clearer and much safer to point in the direction that you plan on turning with the arm that is facing that direction. If a driver notices you pointing, they will notice no matter which arm you are using.
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