Poppies and stadia

I ride a lot and inevitably, not every ride is fun. Sometimes it seems more obligatory than entertaining. Today was not one of THOSE days.

It is about 77 now in the late afternoon. It was for the first time this year warm enough in the morning to begin the ride before noon. Most of my rides are in the late afternoon, after work, before dinner. It has not been uncommon to start feeling strong but to finish pretty well knackered, out of energy.

With a morning start I was throughout the ride riding at a time when my energy level was high. I felt strong, maybe the strongest I have felt this year. It was fun.

Shortly after starting out I passed some orange flowers on Como Avenue. I doubled back to get a photo and discovered poppies.I like orange poppies. Who wouldn't like orange poppies. There was another planting of the same flowers about three houses further along.

The University football stadium, to be known as TCF Bank Stadium, is scheduled to be opened on September 12 for a, what else, UofM football game. Construction seems to be into the final stages.It is actually a fairly attractive looking pile of bricks. It better be, it is costing us plenty. Go Gophers, I guess.

I rode down across the Stone Arch Bridge to the near north side turnaround featured on that route. On the way back I deviated from the River Road and headed into downtown to get a shot of the other new stadium in town. This one isn't scheduled to open until the opening of baseball season 2010, next year. Construction is not nearly as advanced as the Bank Stadium.This one will be Target Field. Call me old fashioned if you will but I find both choices for corporate sponsors and therefore naming rights to be drearily boring. But it is the golden rule, the ones with the gold get to make the rules and in this case the rules are name one stadium after a bank and the other after a discount retailer.

I didn't get a picture on the way over to Minneapolis but the pedestrians had thinned out a tiny bit by the time I was headed back so I stopped and got a photo of the Falls of Saint Anthony.Actually, it was the locks which attracted me as an announcement of a barge entering from the upstream side made my head turn toward the sound. The lock doors can be seen nearly completely closed on the left edge of the picture.

Before I got off the bridge my attention was drawn to another pile of bricks, this one considerably more ancient that the stadia. This is the Platteville limestone Pillsbury A Mill. I liked the juxtaposition of the ancient old building (by American standards) and the fixtures of modern industry.The mill held the title of largest flour mill in the world for 40 years. Completed in 1881, it was owned by Pillsbury and operated two of the most powerful direct-drive waterwheels ever built. The mill is no longer in operation, its future being as housing, loft style apartments, the article says. As with the stadia, that strikes me as drearily boring, but as another application of that golden rule.