P & I found a place to swim that’s much closer to home than Walden Pond: Upper Mystic Lake in Winchester. We swam there yesterday and liked it a lot. The water was pleasant, and there was a buoy about .2 miles off the beach that made for a nice swim target.
It’s four miles from where I live, and half the ride was done on the Minuteman Trail. I forgot my goggles, which was a pain. It wasn’t a huge deal, except for sighting my destination. I already have to work on that, and this made it much worse. Every few strokes I would look up and have to correct my course. It caused a lot of unnecessary strokes.
We’re going to scrap our plan to do a test run at Walden Pond, and do it here instead. There are many possible bike routes, but the easiest is to do loops around the entire Mystic Lakes, each of which would be about 5 miles…
The next time we go there for a swim we’ll do some scouting to make sure the roads are safe enough to ride along. The Mystic Valley Parkway, along the east side of the lakes, had a nice shoulder, almost as wide as a dedicated bike lane.
