Quiet day in Cambridge (10/11/22)

Bob and I have had a quiet day in Cambridge, catching up on laundry, getting the recycling and compost collected for tomorrow’s pick up, and getting train tickets for a quick, 16 minute ride to Ely tomorrow.

But, we did get out for a short bike ride to the end of the bike path along the Cambridgeshire Guided Busway, and then over by the Cambridge Biomedical Campus, and along the art trail to its junction with the national cycling route #11. It’s pretty great when there are so many national cycling routes that you have to number them.

The Cambridgeshire Guided Busway connects Cambridge, Huntington, and St. Ives. At 16 miles, it is the longest guided busway in the world. A guided bus is a normal bus that also has small wheels attached to the front wheels of the bus, allowing it to connect to a track. These wheels steer the bus while it’s on the track.

The Art bike path has colored stripes down the middle of the path and double helices on each end. There are 10,000 stripes, one for each mile of the National Cycle Network as it was in September 2005. The stripes also represent the bases of a vital human gene, called BRCA2, which was decoded at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Hinton. The double helices at each end represent the double helix shape of DNA.