Actually riding from downtown Minneapolis is pretty good. Ride the greenway out west and loop around St. Louis park, ride down the Mississippi River to the airport and back or do a loop around St. Paul.

Google maps actually has all of the primary bike routes/paths well covered. That said, I second the Greenway and East/West River Pkwy trails as the best ways from/to downtown Minneapolis. The Cedar Lake trail is good, too. If you go West and swap trails in Hopkins, you can take the Lake Minnetonka LRT, Dakota, or Luce Line trails and get a really long ride nearly all on trails. It takes a bit more street riding to get there (Como to Wheelock), but you can also go East and take the Gateway and Brown's Creek trails basically all the way to Wisconsin.

This worked out well. I basically rode down Hennepin Ave from the Hilton to the river. I rode SE, past the University and then somehow lost the river trail in construction around Minnehaha park. Continued on the Minnehaha creek trail for a bit before I had to turn around to get back for a meeting. I was impressed with the trail conditions, including reasonably good markings and smooth transitions between surface levels. It was fun to ride somewhere completely novel. Almost ran over a jay-walking homeless dude on my return through downtown and was verbally accosted by the homeless collective watching from the sidewalk! :)

Appreciated the advice!

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Strava