Every year in October I participate in Love To Ride’s (psst, sign up using that link so I can get some extra points when you do your first bike ride!) Biketober competition. The TL;DR is that for every day that you go for a ride, for every mile that you ride, and for every new rider that you invite you get points for your team. At the end of the month winners are announced and there are some fun prizes. It’s not about big miles, it’s about getting more people outside riding bikes, and I love it for that.

This year in addition to Biketober I’ve decided to try the, unrelated, annual Coffeeneuring Challenge. If you’re not familiar with the challenge, the idea is pretty simple: between October 6th and November 18th you ride your bike to 7 different coffee (or other approved beverage) locations, with some minor limits on distance and how often a coffee place qualifies. For a full list of “rules” you can see this years post: “Coffeeneuring Challenge 2024: The Year of Small Wins”.

We’re a little ways into the challenge already, so this post will be how I document my rides for this year going forward! Let’s start with a few I’ve already done. For the purpose of the rules I’ll be starting my weeks on Monday, because that’s just how weeks work and this ridiculous notion that Sunday is both the “weekend” but also somehow the start of the week needs to be abolished.

Week One (Oct 05–06)

Per rule 2: “Soft Launch Saturday” I completed my first ride of the joint Biketober/Coffeeneuring season on Saturday October the 5th! I was on my way back from the Little Five Points Community Center and decided that I’d make a detour to stop at Taco Cantina for a Horchata de arroz. Per rule 6 (“Controversial Beverage Rule”) this was adjudicated in the Court of Coffeneuring Public Opinion on fedi and now only awaits a final ruling by the Coffeneuring Challenge Committee and the Intern.

The overall ride was rather uneventful, but also highlights the major mobility gap in Cobb County, GA. The first four or so miles are from my house to the Cumberland Transfer Center which is the only place in the county that you can catch a rapid bus into Atlanta. I’m lucky enough to be close to the bus station, otherwise I would have to catch another bus to get there which, on the weekend, runs about once an hour. Not an ideal situation: trying to catch a transfer involving two buses that both run once an hour. If you bike, as I did, you can follow the Spring Road Trail and the Mountain to River Trail (M2R) all the way to the transfer center. While this is great in theory because it gets you off the 4 lane road where people regularly do 60mph, the road that the trail is next to is really more of a stroad so every retail establishment along the road has cars pulling out or in who aren’t looking for cyclists and it can be a rather harrowing ride.

Once you catch the bus and arrive at Arts Center Station the transit system improves a tiny bit. Transferring to the train is free and requires one transfer to the blue line which will take you to Inman Park/Reynoldstown Station. As I left the station I was surprised to find a small cycle path that I didn’t know about, Poplar Court Northeast, that cuts through the park to Euclid Ave right next to the Community Center!

The total distance round trip came out to 8.18 miles. A partial GPX trace for this ride can be found here.

The next day, October the 6th I went out for a group ride. To get a few extra miles in this Biketober I decided to ride to Knight Park where the group was meeting at instead of taking the bus. The total distance to the park was 10.26 miles, mostly along Atlanta Road. This may have been one of the stupider cycling decisions I’ve made in a while; in theory there is a bike path being built alongside the road, but there are major gaps with no plans to fill them in as well and no good way to get off the road at points, especially when crossing bridges.

The group ride itself ended up being 10.36 miles, only 0.1 more than the commute, but was a much more enjoyable ride through Westside Park, Atlanta’s largest public park. At the end we stopped off at The Whelan for a bite and a drink! I went with a local Märzen; it’s not a coffee, but Oktoberfest beers seems like good Coffeeneuring drinks to me (though it did not come in the traditional Maß, which is always disappointing). During the winter proper this pub also serves mulled wine, so maybe I’ll stop back by for one of my last rides if they start serving it in time.

The total ride distance (after checking out an open streets festival and a partial ride home) came out to 24.35 miles. A partial GPX trace for this ride can be found here.

Week Two (Oct 07–13)

On the 10th I rode down to meet a friend at Viking Alchemist Meadery, an easy few miles along the M2R trail I mentioned before. I’d never had mead before so the bartender kindly let me try a few samples before deciding what I wanted. It’s not my favorite drink, but a few of the more sour ones were quite nice and a 4 year aged one that I can’t afford (but which he let me take a small sip of) was very nice and it felt like a good Coffeeneuring style drink to me!

I arrived a bit early and they weren’t open yet, so I explored a bit and ended up with a total ride of 5.72 miles. The GPX trace can be found here.

A few days later the nearby city of Marietta, GA was having their annual Chalktoberfest celebration, two days of street art, beers, and a square that’s actually usable by people, not just cars! I took a ride up the M2R trail in the other direction this time to hand out some fliers encouraging people to vote for the Cobb County Mobility SPLOST which will fund a mix of Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) lines and bicycle path improvements in Cobb. On the way back I stopped at Pie Bar and had my first cup of actual coffee! The city of Smyrna was also having its birthday celebration on the same day so I ended up also going back and forth between home and the Smyrna downtown area several times to hear the various concerts. This year featured “Letters to Cleo” and “The Roots” as well as a number of local bands!

Overall ride length ended up being 18.66 miles and a GPX of the main M2R portion can be found here.

Week 3 (Oct 14-20)

It’s October 15th and that means it’s the first day of early voting in Georgia! I took a ride over to the Smyrna Community Center to see what the line was like and was pleased to see that a lot more people than I’ve ever seen during early voting were already queued up (~1 hour wait time according to one of the poll workers).

Nextdoor to the Community Center is the library, so I stopped by there as well and on a whim picked up a copy of “Everyday Utopia” by Kristen R. Ghodsee and “The Contradictions” by Sophie Yanow. I’ve never heard of Yanow, but the book had a bicycle on the cover so that seemed like a good enough reason to grab it. I’ve had Ghodsee’s “Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence” on my “To Read” list for a while, and wasn’t aware that my library had any of her books, so I was excited to learn about “Everyday Utopia”.

Right up the street is Café Lucia so I also stopped for a coffee to complete today’s Coffeeneuring outing. I was pleased to see that they had several fliers with information about the MSPLOST tax on the ballot on their bulletin board that were put out by someone else; sometimes it’s easy to think you’re the only person who cares about public transit, so it’s nice to remember that other people are out there fighting for this as well.

The total ride came out to 3.24 miles, and a GPX is available here.