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I went on another epic bike expedition on Saturday. Unfortunately, it was hastily-planned, which led to problems with Weathorr (got caught in not one but TWO thunderstorms) and also with my various electronic gizmos (my GPS batteries died about a quarter of the way through the ride, and the camera batteries only made it halfway). But even with all that, it was a fun 30-mile ride, and I covered a lot of new ground: I rode down Vincennes (one of those weird diagonal streets) to 105th, and then followed the Major Taylor Trail to its southern terminus just over the Calumet River. This route carried me through a bunch of community areas I’d never visited before (Auburn Gresham, Washington Heights, Morgan Park, West Pullman), and continued my weekly tradition of escaping the city limits at least once, over the river into Riverdale.

Even with all the electronic failure, I got a bunch of photos (complete photoset). Here are some of my favorite bits, as usual.

I had never seen the abandoned Kennedy-King College complex at 69th and Wentworth until today. It’s a shame that such a large building has found no other use! It’s an unusual building, to say the least.

The CTA garage and maintenance facility at 79th and Vincennes incorporates several old buildings from the Chicago City Railway Company’s streetcar shops, built back in 1902.

I took a quick spin into Beverly, and found it to be every bit as pretty as I’d heard. Tree-lined streets and well-kept bungalows abound.

The Major Taylor Trail is not quite as scenic as the Burnham Greenway, unfortunately - definitely passes through some rougher areas.

Gardening for food is really big on the far South Side. I passed at least three sizable gardens along the trail, including this community garden just north of the Calumet River.

The Calumet River is pretty large, and very scenic where the Major Taylor Trail crosses it, before ending up in the equally scenic Whistler Woods Forest Preserve.

I even saw two deer in the woods. Apparently, the local kids are afraid of deer. A group of kids stopped me on the path north of the river to warn me about them.

Overall, a good ride. Not great, thanks to the oppressive heat and humidity, poor light, thunderstorms, and dead batteries. But it was interesting, and there will definitely be a repeat!

So much for spacing out the photo dump. At least I didn’t stay up all night Sunday night doing this, so that’s an improvement. The last of the photos from my Sunday ride are now up! (Read the previous installments here and here.) You can check them out in the full photoset, but here are some highlights and tidbits of interest.

We crossed back over into Hammond on State Street, and after a bit of hemming, hawing, and waiting for a train to pass, decided to go further north before stopping for dinner. The gigantic First Baptist Church of Hammond has its own parking garage!

North of the extremely difficult Hohman Avenue bridge, we cruised fairly pleasantly along up to 134th, passing a number of interesting places in the sunset light.

Then we crossed back over into Hegewisch, and decided to venture west of Avenue O in search of food, and the Baltimore Avenue commercial heart of the neighborhood. I’d never seen that area before. Lots of neat things to see in Hegewisch, but one of my favorite finds was the amazing red firehouse.

This former bank building was also striking.

Baltimore Avenue was a bit dead on a Sunday evening, so after weighing our options (which mostly consisted of a few bars), we went to Doreen’s Pizzeria.

The food was cheap, good, and plentiful, and they were very friendly. They also had a stack of the Hegewisch Chamber of Commerce’s local publication, which was full of useful information about goings-on in the neighborhood. It’s clearly a very tight-knit community. The “Hegewisch Hotsheet” did contain one error that had me in stitches, though: in a section on events in Mann Park, it invited readers to “mark your calendar for the Annual Flee Market, Saturday, September 13th from 8a-2p.” Flee market! Hilarious!

Done with dinner, we fled, but by then it was dark. We got a bit turned around with one-way streets, but managed to ride up Carondelet to 126th, and from there surreptitiously back over to Wolf Lake (the state park there closes at sunset). Not content just to ride through, we stopped for a few photos.

After a false-alarm coyote scare (it was a reflective sign), we headed north again, not to stop until 67th, for more night photo-ops.

The End.