This past Saturday, I went on a 25 mile ride with a group of about 15 people that started in Durham and went through Research Triangle Park. We left at 9:30 in the morning and were back before noon.
Above: part of the group riding on the Tobacco Trail after the main ride.
I rode from my house to the starting location, which was in southwest Durham near the old South Square mall. We rode down the Martin Luther King Jr. Parkway, and then got on E. Cornwallis Road. From there we turned right on Alexander Drive, went straight until we came to Hopson Road, where we turned left, and then made another left on Davis Drive. Davis Drive took us back to E. Cornwallis, where we turned right and then made a left on S. Miami Boulevard. To complete the loop, we turned left on T.W. Alexander and rode back to Cornwallis and MLK.
The map from this trip can be viewed online at http://routebuilder.org/oz.
The traffic was not bad, because we were riding in RTP on a Saturday, so most of the businesses were closed and there were not too many people driving out there. Also, on most of the large roads that we took, there were bike lanes. On the ride, someone was talking about the advantages and disadvantages of bike lanes. The advantage of bike lanes is obviously that they allow you to ride out of the main flow of traffic, but the disadvantage is that they are not as well maintained as the rest of the road and many times you find trash, gravel, or other debris in the lane. This is not as much of a problem for me, since I have a mountain bike and my bike has shocks, but it is for people on road bikes because of their thinner tires.
Overall, I enjoyed the route. I had not ridden this distance in a while; I think we came close to it on our trip to Duke Gardens. However, the weather was a different story. When we left from my house it was pretty cloudy, and looked like it might start raining. Sure enough, by the time we got on the MLK parkway it started to rain. It kept raining for the whole trip, and even though it was raining lightly, it was miserable when combined with the wind and the chilly temperature. We tried to ignore the bad weather, but it really was not the best day for a long bike ride.