part 4 of 6 It had been about more than a year since I had biked out to one of my favorite spots, the Simpson Park Trail. Nancy and I decided to head out there Sunday. From our house, it’s about an 11-mile round trip, via the Dave Clark Path along the Willamette, then the trail through Bowman Park and a side loop up Cox Creek and around Waverly Lake before the out-and-back segment of Simpson trail. When we got near Simpson Park Sunday afternoon, orange plastic barrier material blocked the route we normally take. So we tried another entry point nearby. We found more barrier material, but it had been trampled by people trying to get to the trail. So we entered there. I realized then that the barrier probably had something to do with the nearby Albany-Millersburg Talking Water Gardens project. Work on that project, which is expected to continue until next spring, will result in a 40-acre wetlands that will clean and cool municipal and industrial waste water. We headed north on the trail and saw no evidence of the project at first, but the trail seemed dustier and more difficult to ride on than we remembered. About halfway to the turnaround, we saw a pipeline on one side of the trail. As we approached the turnaround, a private security guard was keeping an eye on some heavy equipment. We lifted our bikes over a pipe to reach to the final part of the trail. On the way back, we took the Cox Creek trail, which runs along the west side of the vast Talking Water Garden site. Quite ...