Saturday March 11th 2023 - Spring Road Trip Day 2 - Richmond Virginia - about 5 miles of hiking, unknown elevation gain

We started out with a visit to a very popular and ‘hip’ bagel shop called Nate’s Bagels.  Without intending to we ended up just a block or so from The Fancy Biscuit, one of our first stops on our big road trip of 2020 which ended up being dominated by COVID shutdowns etc.  The bagel was good and they had Pork Roll, something you can’t normally find outside of New Jersey.  But they don’t toast bagels at all and there were so many people that waiting for out food was hectic and eating it anywhere but the car or maybe in the cold outside wasn’t going to happen even though we were there before 9 am on a Saturday.

We parked near Brown’s Island and walked along the North Bank trail.  There are a number of trails that start in that same area and overall Richmond appears to have an above average urban trail network.  The North Bank trail gets its name because it runs along the North Bank of the beautiful James river.  The James is very wide and shallow and near downtown there are beautiful rapids and rocky features.  While it was shallow, the total amount of water moving through it must be pretty substantial based on the waterfalls etc.  The trail started off looking like a typical urban greenway path but actually it was almost all dirt and rock and had a lot of ups and downs. In sections they have laboriously laid down flat rocks, sometimes in interesting angles to make the path more water resistant and bike friendly.  There was one section where a bypass was built and signed for bikes with a bridge while the hikers went down some large stone steps and across an unbridged gully etc.  This was actually a moderately strenuous trail overall.  

We walked as far as a bridge across the railroad tracks (until that point it wasn’t possible to get to the river because the CSX tracks are ‘in the way’ and fenced off). On the way we noticed and read about 2 massive cemeteries that butt into each other. Riverview cemetery and Hollywood cemetery are both very large, Riverview being about 90 acres itself. We hoofed through the seemingly endless Riverview on the way back, hoping to be able to eventually work our way back to the river via Hollywood but the two properties despite directly touching each other, have no obvious pedestrian connections and the entire long border between them was carefully fenced. So we had to walk out the car entrance of Riverview and then through city streets to complete our long loop walk.

Other than the long walk we also tried out luck at a local sort of casino and finished our evening with a BBQ dinner.  Tonight is ‘spring forward’ day and we at least plan to head to Pocahontas State Park for a 5.5 mile hike in the morning.