Today, my mom and I drove down to St. Joe State Park to pre-ride next weekend's race course. I think we finally got riding around 11:20ish. We set off from the Pim Day Use Area following yellow survey ribbon. The trail that is the race course had evidently had some illegal motorcycle use and they had left ruts. To avoid the worst of the ruts, the trail has been rerouted. These little reroutes haven't been trimmed yet, so they were just a little bit better than bushwhacking on a bike. After about three miles of reroutes, we weren't liking the trail so much, but then we crossed the paved bike path. After that crossing, we went downhill on a really fun, nice trail through a pretty pine grove. Down in the valley the trail went through a lot of little creeks and then came to the Tubes. The Tubes are three steel culverts that go under a paved bike path. The trail went through the far right one. We both walked our bikes out the end because it dropped into a really rocky creekbed. The trail continued in the valley crossing some more creeks and making a long climb back to the bike path on the ridge. After the climb, the trail went though a cool savannah area. Very soon after the savannah, my mom rode up to me and told me I had a flat. It was my rear wheel, too. Both my flats have come on my rear wheel, and both times its taken me forever to get the tire back on the bike. It took as long to put the tire back on the bike as it did to change the flat. On the positive side, I used my CO2 cartridge without wasting the whole thing. After the flat, we somehow followed orange ribbon and biked in a circle. After a little backtracking, we got back on the right path. After maybe a mile more of riding, we got back to the paved path and followed that 0.6 miles back to the trailhead.
Biking through the pines
Here I am dropping into one of the creek crossings.
This is picture of the savannah right before I got my flat.