Yesterday I headed towards downtown Charlotte, NC and talked with the guy from SouthPark Cycles. He pointed me down the road a few miles to the Renaissance Park trail system.

The first trail I took ran me across a frisbee golf course and then started running parallel to a highway. That felt a little weird as I was back in the woods, couldn’t see any cars, but could clearly hear them flying by less then 40 yards away.

Once you get past that part you really get into the meat of the trail system. Lots of quick ups and downs and across a lot of roots. A whole lot of roots. This made for a lot of little vertical drop offs that are always a lot of fun, along with several short, steep and technical climbs.

As a side note, I am really hating riding with platform pedals. Since I broke my shoes a couple weeks ago, I have been stuck on the flats and it makes such a huge difference on technical parts of the trail. There were so many times on yesterday’s ride that I was halfway through a pretty technical climb and I would hit a root and the impact would make my foot slide off the pedal and I would have to stop. So frustrating when I know I can do the climb.

So anyway, I am working my way through this trail system and at each fork in the trail I just take the turn that looks the most interesting. Well it didn’t take long before I realized I had no idea where I was or how far from the car I was. The trails I was getting on were looking less and less traveled. I wasn’t to worried of getting forever lost since I was in downtown Charlotte, but it is still a little funky to be riding around in the woods with no idea where you are going.

So I’m cooking down one path and all of a sudden I pop out into a neighborhood. I stop for a drink on the road and holler to a guy standing outside his house and asked how far I was from Renaissance Park. “Pretty far” he says. He rides and knew that loop pretty good so he pointed me back in the right direction and I started heading back. Thankfully everything started looking familiar.

The tree, that I made it over fine the first time, was lying diagonally across the trail and I didn’t get my front wheel high enough to go over it. Actually, I didn’t even come close cause it brought me to a quick stop and then I did a vertical 180 over the front wheel and ended up laying on my stomach with the bike on top of me. The front wheel never made it over.

I just laid there and waited for my breath to come back to me and for the stars to clear.

The rest of the ride was pretty uneventful as I picked my way back through the root covered trails to the car. When I hit the parking lot I had been riding just under two hours. I still was feeling pretty good, it was just time to head back to the hotel and get cleaned up so I could go pick up my wife.

If you are ever rolling through Charlotte and just have a time for quick ride, I would definitely recommend the Renaissance Park trail system. It’s a fun ride and right near downtown so the drive isn’t to bad. For more Charlotte trails you can check out the Tarheel Trailblazers website.