I haven’t been idle, but the weather has hindered my riding a lot lately. The other issue has been upgrading some of the bike parts. At least it’s not so cold now. Our first image is the north end of the Katy Trail, up near the Cowboy Museum. OKC had proposed extending this trail to run alongside NE Expressway to better connect with other existing bikeways. Of course, this indicates they’ll need to place a new bridge over the Deep Fork just for the bike path, unless they completely replace the existing road bridge with a wider one.
Same project, but farther up and across the river and turning alongside the NE Expressway. This should run up somewhere between the Deep Fork River and the highway a couple of miles until they can connect it to the marked bike route (a street designated for bicycle traffic) on Grand Boulevard where it runs into Nichols Hills.
Another new bikeway is apparently being called the Greenway Trail and extends the north bank River Trail from the Boathouse Recreation Zone to the other end of the Katy Trail. This is one that is mostly finished, but not ride-able yet because it needs two bridges. This is the first bridge being put into place. The bridge is in two parts, pre-built and trucked in to the site. Then the two halves are assembled with the help of a crane.
This is the same bridge after completion. I had to come up to the very edge of the First American Museum construction site to get these pictures. This is the smaller of the two bridges. The other one has the site ready, but it’s a longer bridge, so it’s a different kind of project. It will include a ramp on either end to gain enough clearance for the bracing of the bridge that runs under the deck. I hope I can catch them putting that one in place, too.
My last shot is just a random picture I took of a home site. This is the remains of what had burned down. I didn’t see any charred remains, so it must have been some years ago, and has been washed clean by the rains. Instead, there’s a car parked on a portion of the foundation.
“Cowboy museum,” you say? At first I thought that was an odd choice for a museum, but it makes sense. There was a puppet museum in CT that drive past every time I went to band practice in college. Now that’s an odd museum.
The official name is “National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum”. It was previously called the “Cowboy Hall of Fame”. It has become an even bigger tourist trap than ever, too expensive for me to visit any more and not nearly as engaging as before.