News Record.com: Map puts spin on bicycle routes

Vickie Bridges has two options when she leaves the driveway of her Summerfield home to ride a few miles on her bicycle. 1) Risk death by dump truck in Greensboro and Guilford County. 2) Ride the calm country roads of Rockingham County. “I can go to Rockingham County and have basically no traffic, or I can take a left out of my driveway and go to Greensboro and be terrified,” she said.

Drivers in Greensboro honk their horns and whiz by, she said, while those in Rockingham County tend to give cyclists space. And then there’s the trucks. “There’s a lot of dump truck traffic in Summerfield,” she said. “A few of them that will see how close they can get to you.”

Rockingham County is looking for more riders like her. And with a $5,900 state tourism grant, the Rockingham County Partnership for Economic & Tourism Development is making a map for cyclists wanting to spin on the best of the county’s country roads. “Some of the better roads are out in the rural sections,” said Billy Vestal, a cyclist and former Eden councilman who helped design the map.

It will look similar to the rivers map the partnership printed in 2003, said Robin Yount, director of the partnership’s tourism development authority. That map shows the county’s landings and some sights on the Dan, Smith and Mayo rivers, and it is so popular that it’s now in its third printing, she said. The total cost to print up to 20,000 copies of the biking map would be $10,500, Yount said.

The rest of the money will come from the tourism authority’s budget, which is funded by county hotel tax revenues. Historic markers and places for sightseeing, such as Chinqua Penn Plantation and downtown Stoneville, are marked on the routes, too. Vestal added a 100-mile loop that he mapped out and called the Rockingham County Challenge. “Just in like any sport, you issue someone a challenge and they want to do it,” Vestal said.

Vestal and Yount hope that one day there could even be a bike race in the county inspired by the challenge. Some other routes on the map include Settles Bridge Road, Witty Road, Mount Carmel Church Road. That would help people like Bridges, who used to risk her neck fighting with Greensboro traffic until a friend showed her Rockingham County roads. “I just sort of stumbled into the Rockingham County stuff,” she said. And others would probably go there too, she said, with the help of a map.