Circumnavigating Four Lakes in One Ride

They don't call Minnesota the land of 10,000 lakes for nothing! Today I managed to circumnavigate four of them in one ride. It wasn't even that long of a ride (relatively speaking, it was my longest ride in Minneapolis, but still only 31 miles).  Once again I was primarily on separated bike paths. I returned to the Hiawatha Trail and the Midtown Greenway. The Midtown Greenway took me all the way out to the lakes. Funny thing, I was riding along, and things started to look familiar. Somehow when I was riding to REI, I had ended up on this one particular section of the Midtown Greenway. It took me awhile to remember how I had ended up there before!  I had made a plan of how to go around each lake with a minimum of backtracking. First up was Cedar Lake. I think it was the smallest of the lakes.

Cedar Lake from one of the fishing docks

Curiously, on part of the lake path, there were three seperate trails--one for one direction of bike riders, one for the other direction, and one for pedestrians. This was the only lake, of the four, to have two-way paths to go around. The other three had one-way clockwise directions. After finishing the Cedar Lake loop, returning to where I started, I rode back along the Midtown Greenway a short distance to the Lake of the Isles path. 

The Isles of Lake of the Isles

This was also not a terribly big lake. There were more people walking and riding, but with the one-way direction on the bike path, it made for easy passing. The third lake was Calhoun. In order to not repeat lakes, I did half of Calhoun to a connector path that took me to Lake Harriet. Then, after looping Harriet, I did the other half of Calhoun. It was weird because the wind was really whipping on Calhoun, but a short ditance away, Lake Harriet was pretty calm.

Lake Calhoun

Lake Harriet and some goslings

Cool Pavilion on Lake Harriet

One of the many people relaxing in a hammock

Back on the Greenway, I had the wind at my back all the way back to the Hiawatha Trail. As I was making the turn to go up to the bridge, I saw this.

Horse drawn carriage!

So, this was my longest ride, and I saw even more trails to check out! Here's the Google map of the trails and lakes.