I always hate the “fun size” candy bars.  What is so fun about being done with your candy bar after one bite?

Well, Ernst Trail just west of Meadville may be fun-sized (only five miles), but it’s far more satisfying.  (See my earlier post about possible expansion!)  It’s probably the closest trail to our house, so I use it as my ultimate fallback trail.  And yesterday, I only had a little bit of time, so rather than not ride at all, off to Ernst I went…

Ernst is pretty cool.  In your five miles, you get a covered bridge, creekside shade, open meadows, forest, streams, an underpass under I-79 and a stretch near a rarely active rail line.  (Note my phone picture with visual proof it is active, although I’ve only seen a train once out of maybe fifty times I’ve ridden this trail – and this train was just puttering along.  If you want to see and feel a real train fly by – Stavich is a much better bet.  I’ll review that later…)

You get a lot of walkers on this trail without any real stretches of heads-down biking, because of how evenly spread out the three trailheads are.  But everyone’s typically really polite and there’s rarely enough foot traffic to really be a problem.

Right off the Meadville trailhead is a franchise of Five Guys burgers, so if you want to rollback all the good you did exercise-wise, I highly recommend a little burger and fries.  (Order the “little”, unless you want to put yourself back even further!)