Checking up on Newport's urban prairie! An urban prairie is a tract of land in an inner city that has been abandoned to the point where nature starts reclaiming it. This is the old housing project site (and accompanying roads) north of 4th Street near the Licking River. Cincinnati and Covington are in the background, shrouded in fog.

In the Covington neighborhood of West Covington, on the side of the Ohio River floodwall closer to the river, you see what barely constitutes a path.

A video going west on KY 8 (Highway Avenue) from Covington into Ludlow on the Peace Bike.

Southeast on KY 1072 in Ludlow. This is roughly where Deverill Street becomes Sleepy Hollow Road. Note the unusual walkway on the right. In the background, peep the rail overpass. That's for the rail line that runs from the Cincinnati Southern Bridge to Erlanger and beyond.

This ancient artifact is a former roadway in Ludlow to what used to be something called the Lagoon, which was some type of amusement park with a lake. (Remember how Gilligan's Island had a lagoon?) The site has been empty for decades, and the lake is dry.

"That bridge, that bridge, that clean make-up bridge..." This trail running south of Deverill gives us another view of that rail bridge. The portion of the trail seen here used to be part of Sandbank Road, going all the way to Bromley-Crescent Springs Road. Where the path seems to split, Sandbank went to the right.

Continuing uphill - way uphill - on that trail. I don't think the path here ever was anything more than what it is now.

The path ends up running right along the rail line for a bit. This is northeast on the rail line where it goes over KY 1072.

Continuing south, the rail line forms this little-known bridge over a creek and some woods.

Another view of that obscure bridge.

The woods spanned by that bridge cover the far west end of Covington - namely the undeveloped area west of Sleepy Hollow Road. The woods are actually a wildlife refuge. I have no idea what this item is, but it could have been an old bridge abutment.

I don't recommend this trail - at all. This path continues south through the woods from the previous photo, and it's full of thorns, mud, steep hills, and stretches that are almost impassable. I don't think the trail here ever was anything more than this - other than better.

I accidentally ended up in Fort Wright. For all the trouble the Peace Bike had getting here, at least it was fast going back down. This video takes us west on Amsterdam Road (which one map suggests was KY 1072 in the 1950s) and north on the dreaded Bromley-Crescent Springs Road (site of the infamous 2001 vehicular assault). The high rail overpass at 1:45 is not the same bridge pictured above, though it's for the same rail line. I've long suspected that the white house at 2:40 was an old tollhouse from the days when many rural surface roads were privately owned toll pikes.