Season's Over at Sandcastle and Kennywood

08/21/12 234# 47m

Started at the Bastille at about 0830, about 60F with blue skies and no wind, a perfect day. Rode with S. along the Allegheny to the 40th Street Bridge. Crews were demolishing the bridge structure north of Herr's Island and I was surprised they were keeping the trail open during the operation, it posed a lot of extra difficulty for them.

Crossed the 40th Street bridge, and while we were navigating through the side-streets and avoiding Butler street, we serendipitously came across this mural by Mark Runco at Eden Street and 43½ Street, aka the rear of 4315 Butler Street:

A great mural, no evidence of a title.

Rode through the Allegheny Cemetery, following the "white path" up to Penn Avenue; this was a very efficient and pleasant routing. True to it's Burgh environment, the cemetery has color belts, like you see on hospital floors.

At 4809 Penn near Mathilda, in Garfield, we found "Tuesday's Heroic Paradigm" by Kevinn Fung:


Continued to Liberty Avenue and located "Bridging the Generations of Bloomfield", by Monika McAndrew at 4727 Liberty Avenue, Bloomfield

better photo here from SproutFund flickr

An unplanned find was this woodcut of a Flying Bobeshi, for lack of any other title, at 4610 Liberty Avenue at Sapphire Way. No indication of artist.


This is the Bloomfield VFW Mural.


Across the street from the VFW, at 4428 Liberty, Del's Bar and their adjacent pizzeria has a mural:



Around the corner, the Bloomfield Bridge Tavern has an array of coats of arms from various Polish towns:


At that the batteries were failing and we called an end to the photo-op segment of today's ride. We road Ellsworth to CMU and down Panther Hollow, using some short-cut nav-Ninja magic of S's that I didn't quite grok.

Hot Metal Bridge to Keystone Metals to the waterpark; it surprised me that Sandcastle was shut down, the weather was gorgeous but this is the first week of school.

Continued along the Steel Valley Trail, stopped for a break at the Pump House and watched several through bicyclists pass by. Rode south past Kennywood which was also eerily silent, I guess it's a sign of summer ending.

Continued to the Riverton Bridge and reversed. Along the Waterfront Trail we encountered Duncan and Chris, two riders from High Point NC rocking kitty-litter panniers whom we'd seen an hour earlier. They were stumped at navigating out of the shopping center - so we suggested they follow us, and they joined us to the Hot Metal Bridge which was their destination for the day.

Jail Trail, a few downtown streets, Point State Park, the Casino Trail, and back to the Bastille. It was a great day for a ride. 47 miles in the bag.