The Short Ride Between Lake Mary's Farmers Market and Its Newest Dinner Table
August 20, 2026
August 20, 2026
Most Saturdays go like this: coffee, a walk through the farmers market at Central Park, home to unload the tomatoes and the honey, then back in the car a few hours later to drive to dinner somewhere near Colonial TownPark. Two separate errands. Two separate parts of town.
Except they aren't separate parts of town. They're connected by a strip of asphalt that most people who live here have ridden exactly once, usually on a rental bike during a visit from out-of-town family. The Seminole Wekiva Trail runs directly through the corridor between the two, and its underpass at Lake Mary Boulevard and International Parkway means you can leave Central Park on two wheels and be locking up outside a restaurant patio without ever merging onto Lake Mary Boulevard traffic. The market and the new dinner reservation aren't a morning plan and an evening plan. They're one loop, if you know where the trail crosses the road.
The Lake Mary Farmers Market sets up every Saturday from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. at Central Park, right behind City Hall at 100 N. Country Club Road. It's free to walk through, it's dog friendly as long as your dog is leashed and you're cleaning up after it, and the mix runs from fresh produce and plants to honey, baked goods, and handmade jewelry. This year the market changed hands to a new organizer, Red Top Productions, which now runs the vendor applications and day-to-day logistics. It's the kind of operational handoff that residents barely notice because the market itself hasn't changed shape, still the same Saturday morning, still the same stretch of Central Park.
What's easy to miss, standing in that park with a bag of peaches, is that the same patch of grass does a second job after dark. The patio at Krazy Greek Kitchen overlooks that same Central Park, so the market grounds you walked through at 10 a.m. are the view from someone's dinner table by 7 p.m. It's not a coincidence that the town built its Saturday morning ritual and its evening dining scene around the same green space. It's a small park doing two jobs, and most people who live nearby have only ever used it for one of them.
The Seminole Wekiva Trail gets described in outdoor guides as a shaded rail trail built on the old Orange Belt Railway corridor, and that's true, but it undersells what the trail actually does for someone who lives in Lake Mary. Depending on which measurement you trust, the paved trail runs somewhere between 14 and 19 miles, stretching from Altamonte Springs north through Longwood and Lake Mary toward the Wekiva River. The range exists because the trail keeps getting extended, and different guides caught it at different points in that growth.
The detail that matters more than the total mileage is where it crosses the road. Recently added underpasses eased what used to be a rough crossing at Lake Mary Boulevard and International Parkway, the exact intersection that separates the historic Central Park side of town from the newer retail corridor near Heathrow. That underpass is the seam. It's the reason a market run and a dinner reservation can be the same trip instead of two car trips separated by a stretch of Lake Mary Boulevard traffic.
Keep riding north past that crossing and the trail offers a second option most people never take. Just north of Lake Mary, a marked spur leaves the Seminole Wekiva Trail and crosses Interstate 4 on a dedicated pedestrian bridge, connecting directly to the Cross Seminole Trail. From there, the ride keeps going, eventually linking up with the Cady Way Trail more than 24 miles away in Winter Park. Most residents drive to Winter Park. Fewer know they could get most of the way there on a trail that starts a few minutes from their own driveway.
The retail corridor on the far side of that underpass is Colonial TownPark, a 24.44-acre mixed-use development that functions as the commercial center for both Lake Mary and neighboring Heathrow. Publix anchors the grocery side, AmStar Cinemas handles movie nights with reclining seats and in-theater dining, and Ruth's Chris Steak House has been a fixture for special-occasion dinners for years.
The newest addition is Boca, which opened a location inside Colonial TownPark at 1145 Townpark Avenue. The restaurant describes its own space as an industrial farmhouse build with sidewalk patio seating, built around a menu of handcrafted flatbreads, fresh seafood, and rotating seasonal dishes. It's the kind of opening that quietly resets what a Saturday night near the trail's northern loop looks like.
A short list of what's actually clustered along that same corridor, within a few minutes of the trail crossing:
None of these businesses require a car to reach from the trail. All of them require one if you're coming from the market parking lot instead of the market's back fence line.
If any single business proves the trail is infrastructure and not scenery, it's David's World Cycle, which runs a shop at the Shoppes of Oakmonte on South International Parkway, a short pedal from where the trail crosses at Lake Mary Boulevard. The shop keeps a second location in Altamonte Springs, at the trail's southern end, which means the same business bookends both ends of the ride most residents have never made in full. A bike shop doesn't set up shop at a crossing by accident. It sets up there because people are already moving through, even if half of them are moving through in cars fifty feet away on the road overhead.
It would be easy to read this as a roundup: market here, restaurant there, trail somewhere in between. The actual claim is narrower than that. Lake Mary reads, on a map or from a car window, like two different commercial districts that happen to share a zip code, the old civic core around Central Park and the newer lifestyle center near the interstate. The trail underpass at Lake Mary Boulevard and International Parkway erases that division for anyone willing to use it. The market and the newest restaurant opening in town are not on opposite sides of a Saturday. They're on opposite ends of a fifteen-minute ride.
Next Saturday, that's worth testing before defaulting to the car twice in one day. Grab the produce, lock the bike at the trailhead instead of driving it home, and see how far the loop actually goes before dinner.
If a weekend spent riding between Central Park and Colonial TownPark has you thinking more seriously about which Lake Mary streets put you closest to that loop, Gwyn Picerne knows this stretch of Seminole County block by block, trail crossing included. Reach out anytime to talk through what's actually walkable, what's actually bikeable, and what the map doesn't tell you until you've ridden it yourself.
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