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"   The Burlington Bike Path winds along the city&amp;#039;s lakeshore, across old train tracks, across picturesque bridges, and down forested corridors. During a recent road trip to Vermont in PopMech&amp;#039;s 2014 Subaru Forester long-term test car, my girlfriend and I pedaled north out of town on a Saturday afternoon and out to the Colchester Bike Path. Here the trail turns to crushed gravel and the ride turns a bit bumpier, but it continues all the way to the Colchester Causeway, a finger of pathway bounded by beautiful Lake Champlain on both sides. It&amp;#039;s a gorgeous ride, but first we had to get there from New York with our bikes in tow\u2014which is a troublesome proposition if you&amp;#039;re a person who doesn&amp;#039;t regularly drive to bike, or if you don&amp;#039;t own a vehicle and would need to rent one. Car bike racks can cost $50 to start and escalate into the hundreds for a more serious setup, and that&amp;#039;s for a rig that&amp;#039;s going to spend most of the year buried in your garage. Should you buy or borrow one, you have to mount it on your vehicle safely and without scratching the paint\u2014especially important if you dare to put a bike rack on a rental car. We took the simpler way out: Borrowing the biggest PopMech car and putting the bikes in the back. The roomy new Forester proved up to the task. The 74.7 cubic feet of cargo space behind the front seats proved to be just enough to accommodate two bicycles stacked on top of each other, with room along the side and in the space that would normally be passenger leg room to accommodate other bags and gear.  Although getting bikes into the back of a crossover is an awkward, two-person job, we pulled it off (mostly) without smearing grease on the light colors of the Forester&amp;#039;s back seats and interior paneling, though you&amp;#039;d want to throw down a tarp or some other covering if you were to try this in your own car. Take the front wheels off the bikes and they&amp;#039;ll fit in the back with one of the back passenger seats still up, allowing you to carry a third person in the car.  Bikes secured and road trip under way, the 2014 Forester drives like it did in our early test drive: Awfully fast for something so vast. The driver information display is a bit rudimentary\u2014less like the advanced digital readout you&amp;#039;d find in a Prius and more like a TI-89. However, we liked the center console display that featured the trip odometer and real-time mpg; northbound on the interstate, it crept above the advertised 32 mpg highway. And the Subaru&amp;#039;s wide viewing angles from the driver&amp;#039;s seat let you take in the Vermont foliage as it fades into warm colors while you chew up the miles on I-87. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/a9507/subaru-forester-driver-diary-to-bike-rack-or-not-to-bike-rack-15998023/>