There is a new Greenway in the neighborhood and it's called the New Milford River Trail. Well, sort of. The first part of the New Milford River Trail runs through Sega Meadows Park and it's a little rough around the edges than your more typical rail trail type of Greenway. It dumps out onto Rivewview Road which runs from Boardman's Bridge to Gaylordsville (a hamlet of New Milford).
Upon entering the Sega Meadows Greenway portion at Boardman Bridge, be careful as there is a lot of poison ivy at the entrance. I was a little nervous rolling through Sega Meadows on the Tandem with Katie because the slicks I have on the Burley Rock & Roll are old and probably should be replaced. I was almost wishing for mountain bike tires but we made it through OK.
Riding along the Housatonic River was really nice and Katie and I want to do this again so we can linger along the river a bit more and explore some other areas. I don't know if I would bring my younger kids on their bikes on this route because there are cars using this road. Older kids would be no problem. Hopefully, to the south the future route will be more conducive to families with kids on smaller bikes.
We stopped at the Gaylordsville Country Store for a cool drink and a snack. Kind of an unassuming storefront but inside the place was a rich history of a Country Store that had been in business for decades.
Now this is the Burgerrittovile that I have been dreaming of! The one in Newtown doesn't sell beer but this one does and it has a patio in the back. Definitely need to come back here in the summer!
A little further down the road is this weird looking structure that kind of looks like layer cake. According to local lore, it's a Spite structure. It's called Jan Pol's Tower and it was built by local resident because he angry with state authorities for taking his foster daughter away from him after it was discovered that she was pregnant and the authorities assumed it was Jan. In 2009, The Danbury Newstimes, did a story called: Sad story behind cake-box structure in Gaylordsville. But that recent news account pales in comparison to Lorraine Balint's recollection of the story of Jan Pol and the "Monument of Injustice."
We gawked at the 5 Layer Cake building and snapped a few pictures and then took off back to Boardman's Bridge. It seemed the route back was a little more downhill than it was coming up. I think the next time we ride this, we are going to start from the ball fields in the center of New Milford or maybe even Lovers Leap. According to Tom O'Brien, the person who contacted me about this Greenway is working on connecting it from Gaylordsville to the 1/4 mile section of the Still River Greenway that starts on Silvermine Road in Brookfield.
3 comments:
Very cool! So glad you discovered the road. Craig and I walk and ride there often. His parents live across the river and we can see the Sega Meadows trails from their deck.
River road is such a nice ride. Glad to see you stopped in at the Country Store.
If you ever want a longer trip. At the end of the dirt road heading towards Gaylordsville, take a right up Station Road, over the rail road tracks and then a right up Front of the Mountain Road. It's a good hill. From there you can take a left down Long Mountain and then a right onto Mud Pond. All dirt roads with very little traffic.
Mud Pond will take you out to Camps Flat Road, which you can either ride back down to Gaylordsville, head over to Bulls Bridge or up to Kent.
Mark,
Thank you for riding the trail. I'm sorry I didn't warn you that it's unpaved, and much of it is shared-use. We have a long way to go before New Milford will be considered a bike-friendly community, but I feel like this rustic trail (and the "Share the Road" signs that have been put up on Boardman Road and Grove Street) represents a good start. I appreciate your spreading the word about it.
Tom O'Brien
Tom, I love unpaved and River Road is great. The section through Sega Meadows could use a little smoothing. Take a look at the B2B trail over in Shelton sometime.
Post a Comment