I have been wanting to get out to the Chicago Lakefront Trail for years now and finally made it into the city to ride the entire trail. I was not at all disappointed. This trail is really pretty breath taking (literally when you do the entire trail, as I did 🙂 ). I truly believe that this is one of the best things that the city of Chicago has to offer.

I also wanted to be sure that I got plenty of photos and now video of the trail so I brought my camera and camcorder and have plenty of new photos and video for the site now. I just completed the trail and photo pages but have not yet completed the video. I will post a seperate blog entry when I complete the video.

In the past I have found it too difficult to try to take photos and video on the same trip but since I wanted to get both, and probably will not make it into the city again to ride this trail again this summer, I decided to do both. I took the photos from north to south and took the video on my return trip from south to north. It was a lot of work but worked out much better than trying to switch back and forth between the camera and camcorder.

I also wanted to get a panoramic photo of the city and managed to get a few of these also. Here is one of the photos that I took of the Lakefront Trail from the Shedd Aquarium:

Chicago Lakefront Path and Skyline

This is actually multiple photos that I “stitched” together with one of my photo software packages. This is on the main page (that I just completed) for this trail which is: The Chicago Lakefront Trail.

OK, there are really quite a few photos out there now (at the link above) if you are interested in this trail and I would definitely recommend riding this trail if you get a chance. I am also including a little background on the ride that I didn’t include in the regular trail pages here in the blog.

Since I am currently out of work (or actually out of an income (I have plenty of “work”)), I was able to choose a weekday (a Monday) for the ride and made sure to pick a fairly warm day since anyone who live in Chicago knows, it is always cooler by the lake (in the summer anyway). I knew that this trail had potential for large crowds of people and I wanted to avoid that as much as possible. It is already hard enough to take photos and video while riding let alone trying to deal with massive crowds.

Another advantage of doing this trail on a workday was that I was able to park for free. I drove in on Montrose and was able to find plenty of parking (at about 10:00am) right by the Montrose Harbor. This was not the case later in the afternoon when I returned.

The Laketront Trail is 18 miles one way and I was not in a big hurry since I had plenty of daylight to ride the 36 miles total (it was actually a little longer with a few side trips).

Personally, my favorite parts of the trail were the northern part of the trail around Lincoln Park, the central section where you go by the downtown area and the popular city beaches and the section by the Shedd aquarium. I was not real impressed with the southern end of the trail but there is one advantage to that part of the trail and that is that it does not seem be nearly as crowded as the other parts of the trail.

The Chicago Lakefront Bike Trail is really pretty incredible and I’m sure you can find some favorite sections of the trail on your own but I hope that the pages that I’ve posted, the video that I will be uploading soon and this blog entry will be helpful if and/or when you ride this trail.