On Saturday Betsy and I rode down the Charles River Bike Path. Betsy and I really love tooling around on paths, looking at old buildings and houses and eating good food🙂 New England is a great place to do that and the path along the Charles River is one of the better ones. We started in Watertown sq and rode up to Waltham to eat lunch and then to the end of the trail in Waltham.
The path up to Waltham has many wooden boardwalks, interesting bridges, trail markers and places to sit and enjoy the river.
Many sections of the Waltham path are hard pack gravel, which is my favorite, as well as being covered with leaves. It was a nice brisk day, but not to cold and very sunny. We are trying to enjoy as many of these Indian Summer days that we have left. When we got to Waltham we went to lunch at the Watch City Brewing Company.
We were hoping to have some of their Pie Eyed Pumpkin Ale, but they were all out. We had had some of the Pumpkin Ale over at Redbone’s a few weeks before and that inspired us to go the WCB to have some more. However it was a happy accident, because we found other selections to be just as enjoyable🙂 The brewery is in a section of Waltham that is very near the mill complex that houses the Charles River Museum of Industry. We highly recommend a visit to both.
After lunch we continued on the Waltham section of the trail to it’s end. On the way you go past the mill that housed the Waltham Watch Company. What an out standing mill!
Not much further past the mill is the end of the trail. I think there might be some more little un-connected trails here and there, but we did not explore that and decided to turn back. The City of Waltham was really and industrious city which was also home of the Orient Bicycle and my Nichols Milling machine.
We enjoyed the return trip so much that we decided to continue down the other section of the path toward Cambridge. The next section is called the Paul Dudley White Bicycle path. The path built in the 1960’s and named after the cardiologist who was bicycle advocate among many other things. Dr White brought bicycle riding to a national level in the mid 1950’s after treating President Eisenhower. I think this might be the first designated bicycle path in America?
I have sure enjoyed the Dr. Paul Dudley White path for many, many years and one of the main reasons I love Cambridge. We celebrated the path by going to our favorite coffee shop in the sq Peet’s Coffee🙂
I can’t seem to find a map of the path’s route into Waltham – all the links say that it goes into Waltham, but the maps all show it ending in Watertown Square. There’s an awesome grocery store/farmstand (Russo’s) on the Watertown/Waltham line that’s really unpleasant to bike to on main roads – I would looooooooooove to be able to bike there.
Here is a link to a Lovely Bicycle post about the trail and has links to 3 maps of the route.
http://lovelybike.blogspot.com/2009/08/idyllic-trail-through-charles-river.html
The final bits to Waltham are broken up a bit, but not bad. The final push to the Moody street area is on the road.
It looks as Russo’s is close the trail here.
http://maps.google.com/maps?oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&ie=UTF-8&q=russo%27s+watertown&fb=1&gl=us&hq=russo%27s&hnear=0x89e3781cf631d07d:0x5f45f12250c66e25,Watertown,+MA&cid=0,0,15381632391198307514&ei=hb3LTpWvNKfj0QGl_rA-&sa=X&oi=local_result&ct=image&ved=0CBMQ_BI
From the rt 16 Watertown sq area, you cross over the Charles River and the trail picks up on the other side.
thanks!