Kan's Cycling Adventure

Champaign is the place where I pursued my graduate study. It is also the place where I started to appreciate the beauty of nature and decided to traverse all the parks and main trails in the town. After becoming more experienced, I tried longer distance biking to neighboring towns based on maps provided by Champaign County Forest Preserve District. I still remember the first time I biked over 100 km to Allerton Park in Monticello. I recorded every bike trip with my phone app and combined all the GPX files into one Google Earth file using python. It is truly an accomplishment seeing the map lit by all the paths I took.

I came across the Grand Illinois Trail when searching for potential biking destinations. It is a 535-mile loop trail in northern Illinois with more than half of limestone paths. I took the challenge in the winter of 2016. While being ambitious, it was too hard for me back then considering the lack of preparation (I didn’t even have pannier bags) and weather conditions (negative temperature and short daytime). I only completed one third of the whole trail. The next spring, I learnt my lessons and chose a milder loop in the city area. These two experiences are one of my fondest memories in the US.

I spent four years working in Shanghai after graduation. I went to work by bike every weekday. On weekends, biking is a great way to relax and breathe some fresh air. My favorite biking experiences are the Pudong riverside trail and the 200-km Chongming Island Loop. Songjiang District is also a great place for travel which is within the biking distance range.

Kaizhou is my home town. It is a small town surrounded by mountains. Climbing mountains was my weekly routine back when I was a child. I actually haven’t really explored my home town until I got lots of free time after resigning from my job in 2021. On the one hand, those high mountains (the maximum one is 800 meters) really pushed me hard, as the cities I previously lived in are all quite flat (especially Illinois!). On the other hand, the harder you climb the mountains, the more excited you are riding downhill.