Whether it was through my own initiative or being asked of me, I became responsible for charting a safe route between Highland Park, IL and Lake Geneva, WI. While there wasn't anything wrong with last year's route, one of the riders has a family friend who is willing to serve as a rest stop. Since it wasn't anywhere near the route from last year, it became my responsibility, being the local expect on roads in that area, to find a new route with our added waypoint.At first glance, Lake County's bicycle map isn't very encouraging. Any road that is either orange or red, should be avoided at all costs. These roads have little to no shoulder and quite a bit of traffic traveling at faster than comfortable speeds. All in all, very dangerous for a group of cyclists, particularly around suburban drivers with little to not experience around cyclists. However the good thing about Lake County is our large number of forest preserves. Something like 5%-7% of the land in the county is set aside as forest preserve, much of it with rideable trails. Thus when I originally typed in our stopover address into Google maps, I saw that our destination was near my own house and began finding a series of road and trails that would lead us safely through the many busy roads in the county.After a couple days of researching online through satellite photos, driving, and looking up other maps online, I think I had a plan. Much like the previous year, we would begin going north along the McClory Bike Path, however this year we would take advantage of the North Shore Path to work our way out to the Des Plaines River Trail. From here we would have to take a short jog on Milwaukee Ave (IL-21) to get to Grayslake's wonderful set of trails (the green squiggles in the middle of the map). From there we could work our way up towards Rollins Savannah, and the residential neighbourhoods of Round Lake. From there it would be an easy little bit of navigation to get ourselves to our rest stop on Lake Shore Dr. From there we would have to travel south for a little while just to get to some safer roads, but otherwise we would be cutting down towards Volo bog and then back up towards Johnsburg and out to the Prairie Trail in McHenry County which would carry us up to Wisconsin. Wednesday, I drove some of the roads after the rest stop just to make sure they were indeed suitable for cycling and for the most part the looked great, so my plan for Thursday were to ride some of the trails and start establishing the distances between each turn for the cue sheet.With this in mind, I drove to each of the trail sections that we would be riding and rode them just to get an idea of the turns and distance associated with each, first was a brief section over the channel in Round Lake, followed by an investigation of the construction being done along one of the streets. Turns out that the construction banged up the street pretty well and would be quite impassable all summer, so scratch going through Rollins Savannah, we'd have to travel down the path along Washington. Not nearly a scenic, but certainly not too inconvenient. Next was tracing the route between the savannah and the Des Plaines River Trail. There seemed to be a number of paths through several subdivisions, it was just a matter of figuring out the right one. It was clear that this was going to be a wonderful route, as the scenery through the prairie was quite beautiful. However there was one small snag in the plan, between the prairie and the Des Plaines River Trail lay Milwaukee Ave. While I thought that it wouldn't be too bad, the road was in much worse condition that I had anticipated. The road was busy and shoulderless. No way were we going to be able to ride on this. Furthermore, the connection between the trail and Milwaukee Ave was nowhere to be seen. While there was a dog park, I would later find out that it had no connection to the rest of the forest preserve. Of course this only happened after a couple of territorial dogs had decided I didn't belong there. After a nice little jog up and down the river trail, I was getting a sense that this probably wasn't going to be a good route. Between the unsafe stretch of road and the washed out sections of trail, it was clear that another route was going to need to be devised. Despite the downsides, I still finished mapping it out, in case a better route couldn't be found.After returning home that evening, with 38 miles of biking under my belt, I started to look for alternatives to the river trail, eventually settling on a path through Libertyville. At this point, since I was rather set on the rest of the route, I opted to complete the cue sheet (turn by turn directions) to the best of my ability. It was only then that I realised that my intended rest stop didn't exist. Rechecking the original email I received, I pulled up the location in the original broken Mapquest link and in Google Maps to see that they were referring to different places, furthermore that Google wasn't even pulling up the correct street. Lake Shore Drive is not Lake Shore Road, despite the similarity in name. With a good third of the route no longer applicable, I went back to the maps to see what options existed to get to our new destination. Thankfully a different set of trails, some which I had already looked into for the previous destination, did the trick pretty well.After driving the newly added sections on Friday, there are still a few small portions which I'm not thrilled about, however they're much better than what we had to deal with in the previous incorrect route. Hopefully this new route will be as scenic as the last, but that remains to be seen. And without further ado, here is a the proposed route:<a href="http://www.mapmyride.com/ride/united-states/il/highland-park/529123813478882809">I4k - Jun 22</a>
