One of my favorite rides takes me on roads through Long Grove, Hawthorn Woods, Wauconda and Lake Zurich.
This is a ride for the more serious road cyclist. Even though one of the key roads to Long Grove has a big bike lane for a lot of the way, most of the time I’m riding with traffic. It’s not a lot of traffic, and on a lot of this route there’s a shoulder on the road, but it’s real road riding nonetheless.
I’m coming from Schaumburg, so my common route into and out of Lake County is the long north-south Ela Road. I ride through Schaumburg and Hoffman Estates to the Paul Douglas Forest Preserve trail, which crosses Ela Road. I take Ela all the way north over the Lake-Cook border and proceed to Long Grove Road.
Long Grove Road is the road with the big bike lane from Ela to Rand Road. It’s a nice ride east largely lined with trees as you pass the subdivisions, or a pretty park in Deer Park. East of Rand, the road gets narrower and quieter without a bike lane as you go through more tree-lined Long Grove. The traffic isn’t too bad, but you must cooperate with drivers on a little bridge.
Soon you get to Route 53. I turn left and take it to Old Hicks Road, which takes me south toward the Buffalo Creek preserve. But I stay on Checker Road around the preserve, making the turns until I get to Country Club Drive. I weave through the subdivision to Schaffer Road. I ride north back to Route 53.
Here I turn left — navigating around a lot of traffic especially later in days, not for the uninitiated — and get to Robert Parker Coffin Road. Turn right and you’ll head to the famous covered bridge, seen at the top of this page.
I ride through the downtown to Old McHenry Road, and I take that a good distance northwest. This is a long, pretty stretch. It also can be busy with traffic on weekdays, especially at the intersections with Midlothian and Fairfield roads. Railroad tracks nearby complicate that further; the good news is that a railroad underpass and a bike path are planned for this stretch, but that work probably won’t start until the late 2020s.
At the northwest end, I take some of the back roads near Wauconda. You really can go as far as you’d like into and around Wauconda, and its Bangs Lake, and then back; it’s lovely to ride through especially in the summer.
On the route I posted here I weave through interior Hawthorn Woods on the way back. Within the main roads, the village has its own feel, with spacious, open-air lots. I ultimately get back to Old McHenry Road, where I head back southeast to Echo Lake Road.
That’s what takes me into Lake Zurich. You can weave west a little through the village so that you can come back east on Old Rand Road along the actual Lake Zurich. One way or another I ride through the downtown quickly via Main Street. Take the little Robertson Road — not Route 22 just ahead of it — and finally a little sidewalk to the intersection of Route 22 and Ela Road. I take Ela back home.
Ela Road’s shoulders are not huge, so you have to be used to traffic. I avoid it during rush hour but otherwise find it fine — though maybe a little long if I’m tired.
Another way to Long Grove is to go north through Arlington Heights from Busse Woods, finally accessing Long Grove via Wilke Road onto a gravel Buffalo Creek trail, or via Schaffer Road, though crossing Lake-Cook Road is dangerous at the wrong hour.
In any case, I love the long, scenic Old McHenry Road, and riding around Lake Zurich is fun on warm days, so this makes one of my favorite summer rides.
Photo gallery: Ela Road to Long Grove Road to Long Grove to Lake Zurich
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Awesome article. Thanks!!