Jump in Lake Natomas

On May 25, I wrote that I had gone to bed exhausted after the bike ride I had gone on with my 9 year old boys the day before in Browns Ravine at Folsom Lake. The boys got up around 8 o’clock in the morning in the hotel room I had gotten for us for the night in Folsom’s Historic District.

We checked out late and went looking for breakfast. The diner I liked no longer existed so we went to another place with long lines and high prices. When we were ready to go we rode the Natoma Trail. I made a video like I always do. The boys were really fast and they had no complaints. They chased each other, but eventually they were making each other nuts so I asked them to stop.

The bridges along Highway 50 had no jumpers. Normally 20 something year-old kids will hang out on the lake there to jump into the water 10 feet below. However, I did see a lot of bikes parked there. There were also a lot of electric bikes everywhere. I made the boys jump in Lake Natomas when we got to Nimbus Dam. While it wasn’t especially hot that day, the swimming area there is really great.

We rode to the fish hatchery and then we crossed over the Fair Oaks Bridge to visit the small town of Fair Oaks. I noted that the boys are a riot when they ride together. When we crossed back over the Fair Oaks Bridge headed to the Sunrise Bl Bike Path, the boys almost went the wrong way down the Jedidiah Smith trail because the path off makes a big clover leaf there.

As I had gotten a room for us on the far side of Highway 50, I was trying out the Sunrise Bike Path as a way to avoid extra work crossing big boulevards and it has the extra benefit of crossing under Highway 50 and passing near Sunrise Station.

Surprisingly, I found that the route is not only easier to use but it also goes through a group of hotels – two which had amenities comparable to I had booked for that night. I decided to keep it in mind for the next trip I made through the area.

While crossing Folsom Boulevard to Mercantile Road, we inadvertently passed the connection to the Folsom South Canal so we connected to it at Sunrise Bl. So, we were only on it for about a mile. I also missed getting a photo of that area. After that we connected to a neighborhood with a long and well made bike path called the Villages at Zinfandel on International Drive. That got us a stone’s throw from the hotel I had booked on Quality Drive.

We had stayed there a few times and liked the hotel a lot there but the place is literally a giant parking lot. When we had checked in, we did laundry and went swimming. I also found us a Chili’s and when we went back to the hotel, I got the boys mochi.

This is an occasional series chronicling my life. This Notebook Analysis series is meant to be contemporaneous piece developed as an agglomeration of my notebook pages. In each of these posts I used my notes to develop my recent thoughts.