If you rode the Good Neighbor Trail before 2024 and turned back somewhere near a chain-link fence and a pile of orange cones west of downtown Brooksville, you rode half a trail. The other half sat unfinished for years while Florida's Department of Transportation drove steel pilings into the ground on both sides of State Road 50, a process loud enough to hear from the courthouse square. That gap is gone now. Most of the internet has not caught up to that fact.
Search for the Good Neighbor Trail today and the apps that show up first, AllTrails, TrailLink, Komoot, still describe a 10 or 10.1-mile point-to-point path running from Russell Street Park to a junction with the Withlacoochee State Trail out at Croom. That description is not wrong. It is just incomplete, and it has been incomplete since May 22, 2024, when local leaders and FDOT officials gathered in Tom Varn Park to open the last piece of a $20 million connector that finally links downtown Brooksville to the Suncoast Trail. If you have not ridden the full route since then, the trail you think you know is shorter than the one that actually exists.
The Gap That Closed While Nobody Was Watching
For years, two separate trail segments existed on either side of Brooksville with no paved way to get from one to the other. The Suncoast Trail connector, a 4.5-mile stretch built alongside Cortez Boulevard from the Suncoast Parkway to Cobb Road, opened in November 2021 at a cost of just over $5.5 million, built by Watson Civil Construction. East of that, the original Good Neighbor Trail ran its familiar 10.1 miles from Russell Street to Croom, following the old Florida Southern Railroad narrow-gauge line through Withlacoochee State Forest.
In between sat roughly 3.2 miles of missing trail, the stretch that would have to thread from SR 50 west of Cobb Road, along Jefferson Street, through Tom Varn Park, down Broad Street to Main, and finally to Russell Street. That segment cost $20 million and took SEMA Construction from September 2022 to May 2024 to finish, including a new pedestrian bridge carrying the trail over SR 50 near Cobb Road. Add the three pieces together, the 4.5-mile connector, the 3.2-mile downtown link, and the original 10.1-mile mainline, and you get a continuous paved ride of nearly 18 miles one-way, from the Suncoast Trail crossing near the parkway all the way to the Withlacoochee State Trail junction at Croom. That is not a rounding error on the old 10-mile figure. It is close to double.
What the Trail Actually Bought Brooksville
| What most listings still say | What has been true since May 2024 |
|---|---|
| Trail runs about 10 miles, Russell Street to Croom | Trail runs nearly 18 miles one-way, Suncoast Trail to Croom |
| Trail "ends" near a downtown construction gap | Gap closed with a $20 million FDOT connector and new SR 50 pedestrian bridge |
| Two disconnected segments, Suncoast Trail and Good Neighbor Trail | One continuous paved corridor through downtown Brooksville |
Patricia Laird, co-owner of Crank Works Bicycles in Brooksville, watched this project move from idea to pavement over roughly a decade. She was involved when the Coast-to-Coast Connector was first envisioned in the mid-2010s and still unfunded. When Governor Ron DeSantis signed off on $50 million to close statewide trail gaps, the Good Neighbor Trail connector finally got its money.
"From an economic standpoint, this is an amazing opportunity for Brooksville that the trail is coming through our area. I'm frequently asked for suggestions on where to eat or where to stay by cyclists that are traveling the C2C route. Many stay at our locally owned bed and breakfasts and eat at our local restaurants."
Laird has also pointed out something less obvious than economic upside: Florida leads the nation in bicycle fatalities, and a growing number of riders are choosing paved trails over shoulders and bike lanes precisely because of that record. A finished, continuous Good Neighbor Trail is not just a longer ride. It is a longer stretch of road you never have to share with a car.
The Middle Stretch Still Has Its Own Rules
A longer trail does not mean an easier one, and the parts that were always there have not changed. Once you leave Tom Varn Park heading east, the route into Withlacoochee State Forest and Croom Wildlife Management Area is remote by design, straight, lightly shaded, and largely unsupplied. Riders on TrailLink have noted flatly that there is nowhere to get water and no bathrooms once you are past Russell Street Park and Tom Varn Park, so plan your stops before you commit to the middle miles.
The trail has also had its share of surprises. One rider account describes hitting a large, unmarked pile of sand near mile marker 6160, enough to fishtail multiple bikes before other cyclists rerouted onto the adjacent highway to avoid it. Another rider mentioned a temporary closure while Duke Energy worked on power poles along the eastern stretch, a reminder that this corridor still shares space with active utility infrastructure and is not immune to short detours. None of this makes the trail less worth riding. It just means the version of the trail in your head from a few years ago, or from an app that has not updated its trail notes, is not the version you will find on a Tuesday morning ride.
Tom Varn Park Is Doing Double Duty This Fall
The park that anchors the middle of the trail is not just a rest stop. It is where the City of Brooksville has scheduled most of its fall calendar this year, which means a ride down the trail can double as an errand if you time it right. According to the city's own event calendar, the lineup running from late September through the end of October includes:
- City Movie Night, September 25, 7 to 10 p.m.
- Harvest Howl, hosted with Hernando County Sheriff's Office Animal Control, October 3, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
- Pumpkin Patch Park Takeover, Tuesdays through Sundays, October 18 through 31
- Hernando Hustle 5K Walk and Run, a Greater Hernando County Chamber of Commerce event, October 24 at 8 a.m.
- City Truck or Treat, October 28
That is on top of Founders' Day events running downtown from October 10 through 17. If you have ever driven past Tom Varn Park on the second weekend of March and wondered why the parking lot was overflowing, that is Art in the Park, the county's largest art show, drawing roughly 6,000 people to the same shaded loop the trail runs through. The point is not that any single event is unmissable. It is that the park sitting at the trail's midpoint has become a genuine gathering place, not just a spot with a bathroom and a bench.
When the Ride Actually Feels Good
None of this changes the basic seasonal math that has always applied here. The cooler, drier months, roughly November through April, are the stretch most cyclists here consider prime riding season, and anyone who has tried the shadeless run along the SR 50 connector at 2 p.m. in August already knows why. Late September still carries some of that heat and humidity, but the trail is open year-round, and the shift toward the comfortable window is close enough now that a fall evening ride, especially one that ends at Tom Varn Park during Harvest Howl or the pumpkin patch, is a reasonable bet most weeks.
The bigger shift is not seasonal. It is that a ride which used to dead-end at a fence now connects two trail systems that residents can treat as one long backyard, and that the businesses along it, from Crank Works to the other Brooksville bike shops, have been counting on exactly this moment for a decade. If you have not pedaled past where the old gap used to be, that is the mile worth checking out first.
Whether you are already rooted in Hernando County or just getting to know the trails and parks that make daily life here what it is, Kimberly Pye knows this ground well enough to talk about more than real estate when you ask. Schedule your free consultation and home valuation whenever the conversation turns from trail miles to square footage.
