Book Shows Best Bike Rides in New England

 By David Sobel

If you’re a casual bike rider who likes 10- to 15-mile rides on backroads around New England, I encourage you to check out my new book, Best Bike Rides in New England: Backroad Routes for Cycling the Northeast States. I’m 73, and my wife is 63, so we’re into reasonable, not ardent, exercise.  And we aspire to doing some outdoorsy sport four or five times a week—biking in the summer, skating, Nordic and downhill skiing in the winter.

The book includes descriptions of 30 bike loops in all six New England states. I originally wanted to write a guide to backroads biking in the Monadnock region (my home neighborhood), but I couldn’t find a publisher interested in a book with that limited geographic scope. The publisher I found, Countryman/Norton, said they’d like me to do a bike book, but they wanted it to cover all of New England. 

That task was initially daunting, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized I did have good bike loops in all the New England states. During the pandemic, going off to redo rides, take new pictures, and ferret out new loops was a great way to be outdoors in socially distanced places in the summer of 2021. A good number of the rides in the new book are located in central New England, but there are good rides close enough to Belmont. One of my favorites connects Concord, Bedford, and Lexington, just a hop, skip, and a jump away. 

I’ve been working on this book for the last 20 years as I’ve designed bike rides that explore old New England. It’s been great fun to poke around on bikes in search of historically preserved town centers, not-maintained-in-winter roads, rural corners of Massachusetts, and tucked-away urban pathways. 

I like arriving in a new village for the first time on a bike, rather than in a car, to see how the landscape and architecture unfold. First, a scattering of houses, an old schoolhouse, the Congregational church, a cemetery, and maybe a store. In larger ones, a pizza place and a tattoo parlor. They provide glimpses into New England’s history and evoke dreams of what it would be like to live here. And I like figuring out where the local swimming hole is for post-ride cleansing and renewal. 

This book recreates some of those explorations for you. Some of these rides are now part of our annual regimen. A few are new, recent discoveries in the constant search for perfect bike rides. Luckily, some of these lost villages are being found—found enough so that there are little cafes, bakeries, bistros, and pubs tucked into restored mills and renovated opera houses.

Take Petersham, Massachusetts, for instance. It’s not on a main road, but the Petersham Country Store is a destination lunch spot. That’s the idea of this book. Off-the-beaten-track biking on back roads, rail trails, maybe some mellow single track, followed by suggestions of great places to wash away the road dust and sweat, rounded out by lunch or an early dinner at one-of-a-kind, homegrown cafes. Bike, swim, nosh. The simple pleasures. 

Here are two of the rides within 90 minutes of Belmont that are described in the book and have become favorites.

“The Reformatory Branch and Battle Trail” ride uses three bike trails to make a loop from Concord through Bedford to Lexington and back to Concord. A couple of sections of the ride give you that remarkable lost-in-time feeling, and you get that sense of being far away from the metropolitan area.

“The Land of Lakes” ride takes you from Chesham to Nelson to Harrisville to Dublin, New Hampshire, on quiet backroads and along the shores of at least seven different ponds and lakes with a few marshes in between. Nelson was the first lost village I came to in New Hampshire for a February contradance way back in 1972.

The rides vary from about 10 to 28 miles, with the majority being around 15 miles. They’re all loops, avoid busy roads, and have all been vetted. I was initially opposed to calling the book Best Bike Rides because that sounded kind of self-congratulatory. But when I re-ride them after being away from them for a year or more, I think, “Wow, that is a great ride!” I think you’ll find some rides to your liking in this book.

David Sobel is a professor emeritus in the education department at Antioch University New England in Keene, New Hampshire. The Best Bike Rides in New England is his first biking travel guide.