‍For this Sunday morning ride up to Cobb county I decided to use the west side of the river for a change. I'd spied this as a good alternative from looking at cycling heatmaps that seem to indicate lots of use by cyclists. So I figured that around sunrise these collection of roads would be basically deserted but I found that not only were there lots of cars at 7:30am on a Sunday, but it was bad enough that it was hard to take a left. Weird. Not the worst road mind you but annoying and far from a good road to ride on in comparison to the other side of the river in Atlanta. Sucks cause I had hoped that this might be another alternative to riding home from the north but it's not to be. So after a dozen or so industrial dead ends I began the difficult challenge of riding residential dead ends, beginning with lots of non cul-de-sac ones. These ones were mostly in 3 story townhome subdvisions which Cobb county has so many of. I feel more weird riding these than ones with turning circles so I prefer to do them early in the morning. These went by without much issue and actually they weren't all that steep surprisingly. Next I did a couple of roads that crossed the railroad and were total unknowns. Very old street view showed a narrow street with overgrown lots and recently demolished homesites. I expected to see brand new houses upon my survey but to my surprise it was exactly the same, no change in over a decade. Kind of eerie, lots of overgrown homesites and strangely few large middens of trash dumped. It also wasn't gated or anything. The other street nearby ended at a couple of brand new houses and there were at least half a dozen warning signs trying to convince you not to travel down the road(even though it was obviously a public road). Rounding out my wandering inside the perimeter here were more townhomes and apartments then once I crossed over the interstate it was all large expensive detached houses. This is where it got super hilly and the going got real slow. I planned to stop near "downtown" Smyrna at a water bottle filling fountain that I knew for sure was there near the library. When I got there a bit after 11am I found it very crowded. There was some sort of festival going on with lots of vendors set up in the road and since it was so many people, I decided to go around another way so I turned around. Thankfully it wasn't too hard to find my fountain and despite my anxiety I confidently rode up and filled my bottles amidst the throngs of people out enjoying the morning. Everywhere around this gathering the streets were filled with people out walking around so the next hour or so I was rarely alone. I made a very quick store stop and continued on back into subdivision land which strung along for a very long while. More steep roads and dead ends that end in the middle of a hill. In addition the collector roads were fairly busy as well which was pretty annoying. If they're like that on Sunday morning I can't imagine what a Friday evening is like. I was really looking forward to the Silver Comet as I kept very gradually working my way south and it seemed to take an interminally long amount of time grinding up steep hills and turning around and waiting at intersections. I was just looking forward to easy. I was also ready for a little break. I planned a stop at nearby North Cooper Lake Park which has water, restrooms and mountain bike trails. The last time I was there I decided to skip any trails because I decided the ride was hard enough. I resolved to avoid this on this day and so I took a nature break and then set off to do a little loop around without worrying about trying to complete the whole trail system(which isn't much). The park had lots of cars in the parking lot so I was unsure how many bikes I would encounter on the trails. As it was I didn't see anyone else, on foot or bike. It was decent riding, some technical bits with rocks and very tight and twisty. Also some pretty large trees along the way too. I set off back to the Silver Comet and rode back up in anticipation of another little loop of subdivision land which was honestly the most challenging riding of the whole day. It was extremely steep, ridiculously so in some cases, and the collector roads were busier. So I spent a lot of energy here trying to get it over with and I was thrilled to arrive at my last stop at a QT and looked forward to the remaining much easier trip back south towards home through Atlanta on mostly paths. The trip through was very pleasant and uneventful. I realized that my eta had slipped well past sunset and also I needed to add about 3 more miles. I decided to scrap my original planned route to skirt the airport and come back on Old Bill Cook to Buffington to avoid 29 altogether but in the end I decided I didn't want to bother with all that and instead just came back the normal way through 29 and Buffington directly. This was a great choice as they have made progress on widening the road and had almost half of Buffington diverted onto a temporary new road and the old existing road was closed off so I just rode that without worry. A new source of anxiety came up in that I realized that my headlight was low on battery. In the morning I had absent-mindedely left it running for far too long after the sun rose and then in the evening I ran the flash for a good while and apparently this drained it enough that I was left with not enough for the hour or so after sunset. So I changed my route up a bit and kept it off the whole time basically until the very end. I diverted to Lee's Lake road and over to Adams, Swanson to Tyrone which wasn't too bad as the dusk was still pretty good lighting at this point. I figured i'd just take Senoia road as it has the most streetlights but in the end I decided to ride down Valleywood road(gravel) and man was it dark by that point. So I burned the light a bit here and then I took Castlewood road to cross the highway without a traffic light and this was painless, then I basically had enough light to not worry about running it on the dark parts in between the streetlights, although I still rode most of the trip home in the dark which while not ideal was a cool experience. Thankfully this whole time my radar had more than enough battery so I had it flashing the whole time. 👏 90.33 new miles -- From Wandrer