This past Sunday afternoon, I asked my wife if she wanted to hop on her bicycle and ride a little while with me, and so we did.

I wanted to wheel away from the election news, having had my fill of the TV talking heads and the print pundits. I wanted to glide back into the real world. So while my wife's parents watched our kids, she and I rode for miles.

Plenty of others had the same idea. We biked down the hill to reach the Allegheny River Trail that runs along the North Shore, and found a stretch alive with bikers, walkers and joggers, a scene that was a world apart from the lonely shore it had been when I moved to the North Side 18 years ago.

I had come to take the trail for granted, but now I know better. I drove to Irwin on Saturday night to speak at the annual dinner of the Mon-Yough Trail Council, and learned just a little about how much unsung volunteer effort it takes to maintain more than 13 miles of trail from McKeesport to Sutersville on the winding Youghiogheny.

I've yet to ride that stretch, part of the Great Allegheny Passage that is nearly complete between Pittsburgh and Cumberland, Md., which in turn connects with the C&O Canal Towpath from Cumberland to Washington, D.C.

That's 335 miles in all, but most people bite off only small pieces. Our North Shore Trail is across the river from Point State Park, the northern terminus of the Great Allegheny Passage, and so not included. But the trail along the Allegheny is supposed to connect one day with others for a continuous trail to Lake Erie.

Our country may one day have the largest official bike route network in the world, some 50,000 miles by one recent estimate.

Given all those potential rides, what does it take to qualify as an "avid cyclist"? That's the term everyone seems to use. Kind of like "devout Catholic" or "unmitigated gall," only one adjective seems to qualify as the proper descriptor.

But my dictionary's first definition for "avid" is "having an ardent desire or unbounded craving," and that lets the air out of my tires. I don't like to cycle in the rain or when it's cold out or on Liberty Avenue at rush hour.

The second definition is "marked by keen interest and enthusiasm." That's closer. I like riding a bike. It makes me feel young, or at least younger. I also like that my trips don't pollute, that my 10-minute commutes to work are free and that each ride seems patriotic.

I know the half-dozen or so bikes locked outside the Post-Gazette building on any given workday have played only the tiniest role in the recent destruction of demand for oil. But the caving of the price of a barrel of crude, from a summertime high of $147 to less than $60 last week, has reined in the wealth and ambitions of Venezuela, Iran and Russia, without any American firing a shot.

You can chalk that price collapse up to worldwide recession, but I avidly say, "Ride on, brothers and sisters, ride on."

"I'm calling it our 'Final Four,' " Linda McKenna Boxx, president of the Allegheny Trail Alliance, said of the missing few miles to the great trail, all in Allegheny County. "It's a little more than four, but 'final four' sounds better than 'final five.' "

The trickiest portion of that will be the 0.7-mile stretch through Sandcastle, the big waterpark in West Homestead. There are liability issues. But Ms. Boxx says that by this time next year, cyclists from the Mon Valley will be pedaling through the park to connect with the trail on Pittsburgh's South Side. There will be just an 8-foot-wide corridor there, and for a stretch of about 50 feet, the width will be squeezed to just 6 feet.

"It's fine," she says. "Connectivity is the key. If it's a little inferior to the rest, nobody cares. It's so much more important to get from Point A to Point B."

When I ran her words past Pete McAneny, Kennywood/Sandcastle president, he e-mailed to say the information wasn't accurate. But he also said, "We remain optimistic the new layout may work."

The devil remains in the details, but if the extension and linkage of trails do nothing else, they are providing evermore routes to cycle to work easily and safely, and a cheap, accessible, family-friendly pastime for the weekend.