Fun & Fitness over 50

Well, one of the longest or so they say. The Mohawk-Hudson Bike-Hike Trail runs approximately 35 miles from the Corning Preserve on the Hudson River in Albany, NY to Rotterdam Junction just west of Schenectady.
Here is the North-South section from it's start in Albany north to Cohoes.

Here is the East-West section from Cohoes to Rotterdam Junction:

This Sunday, as is my custom, I took my "long" bike ride of the week. I am working up to a half-century and beyond. My last longest ride was 35 miles. I had hoped to do 40 on this trail Sunday but didn't have enough time. I wound up doing 30.
This trail is a great resource for me. It's mostly flat so it's good for heart-rate and cadence training. Much of it was uncrowded and there are many scenic vistas along the way. I routinely ride the south to north section (about 12 miles round trip) on my lunch hour at work but have never explored the rest of it.
Sunday started out a little unsettled. It sprinkled a bit in the beginning of the ride from about 1:40 but dried up nicely as the afternoon progressed. As I said, it's mostly flat along the river but there are a few good hills which I hammered trying to see how high I could get my HR. The trail passes the Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory and a GE facility. I would like to have taken pictures but in these post-9/11 days I'm afraid the guards at the gate would have come rushing at me with guns drawn!
I thoroughly enjoyed this ride and am excited about exploring the rest of it. At some point I would like to do the whole thing out and back; a total of 70 miles. Here are some pics which I DID dare to take! ;-)

Typical trail shot near my start point:


The Cohoes section has a few of these metal culvert type tunnels under the roadways


This is the Thadeus Kosciuko Bridge over the Mohawk River (mercifully referred to locally as the "twin-bridges")


Typical scene along the Mohawk River


This is called "Lock 7". The path runs along the old towpath for the Erie Canal system


The bike path is mostly asphalt paved so it's good for road bikes and skinny tires


This section is between the atomic power plant and lock 7 looking east