I have been stopped by a train on the railroad tracks very, very rarely, perhaps never before. But today I arrived at the Soo Line crossing of Victoria at County Road E just as the train arrived. I ducked around the barrier and got within a few feet of the rushing boxcars and snapped a photo showing the train going down the tracks away from me. I was inside the crossing arm but completely safe from the train. It was a perfect illustration of the rule that the train only comes between the rails.
Then as I was riding around Bald Eagle Lake I stopped to photograph the eagle platform. I spent some time lining up an arty shot and had to wait for the lady walking her three dogs to clear the frame. But eventually I got the angle and composition I wanted and snapped away.
It was too noisy next to the tracks to hear the beeping but out there by the lake it was quieter. The camera informed me with a message in small print on the viewing screen that recording the image was not possible because the camera did not contain a memory card.
I found the memory card when I got home just where I had left it, still in the multi-card reader slot on the front of the computer.
I did have this picture that I took one day this week but did not use because I liked the picture of the drive-in menu better. It is Lake Owasso from an angle not usually seen. You have to pause and shoot between a couple of houses to get this view.
I was riding home from Bald Eagle, plenty tired but determined to keep to the regular route past Lake Vadnais. I was riding along the less often ridden south shore of the lake. The road goes up and down and up again and down again along that shore before ending with that final climb up to Rice Street. On the first uphill away from Centerville Road I came upon a youngish person on a mountain bike. I came up behind him without any great difficulty but hesitated and chose not to pass. He was doing pretty respectably and I hate nothing more than someone who passes and then cannot stay in front. This person looked young, was riding strongly, and looked as though he might want to race downhill. I didn't want to race.So we topped the crest and he started clicking through his gears climbing back up to something in which he could ride fast. I shifted up to the big ring and gave a single push to get me started on the downhill. I then sat tight, figuring he would speed away.
He kept clicking up through the gears but his fat knobby tires absolutely betrayed him. He was pedaling furiously and I was just sitting there. I started to gain. He kept clicking and pedaling, picking up speed, as I just sat there, picking up speed faster.
Towards the bottom of the hill he was still pedaling furiously as I coasted past, still not having pushed a single stroke since the top of the hill.
I think I won a race but actually it was tire efficiency, not human effort, that won this race. It was an interesting demonstration.
3 comments:
Good story -- that missing memory card pretty much guarantees that those shots will never line up that way again.
Bald Eagle Lake again? Good on 'ya.
Gino, I just found your blog through some random Googling -- great photos and writeups. I'm a homesick native of Saint Paul now living in Berkeley, CA. You seem to have visited a lot of my old neighborhoods and haunts! The Spanish-Moorish house on Frontenac Place in Desnoyer Park in your 9-12-07 entry belonged to my childhood piano teacher, Dora Gosso. It was extraordinary inside too -- it has an open atrium and if I remember correctly there was a live fig tree growing inside. This style of architecture is fairly common in California, but for a child in Minnesota the idea that someone had a TREE in their HOUSE....way cool.
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