Friday, September 18, 2009

Light northeast wind

Today a light northeast wind and warm morning temperatures led me back to a very familiar ride, the 8 lakes tour. I checked my bike log. I don't always note destinations in the notes section (it is a spreadsheet and I try to keep notes brief) but I am pretty sure that it has been over three weeks since I rode to Lake Vadnais.

Did I note any changes? Well, it is still a very pretty ride. The lakes are scenic and the glacial terrain which produced the lakes is always a nice challenging ride. Here is one change though, a big willow tree has either fallen into the lake or has been cut down and fallen into the lake. In either case a new big bare spot on the shoreline has been created. Soon it will be someone's favorite fishing spot.Quite a bit of the tree is still in the lake so if anyone over in Saint Paul notices that the water tastes like willow, I know the reason why.

It isn't really fall out there yet but it pretty clearly isn't summer anymore either. The leaves on the trees are starting to trend ever so slightly to the yellow side of the spectrum. Here is a view of the north shore of the lake from just north of the mid-lake parking area.Vadnais was pretty today.

This evening in Corsica FC Nantes continued its recent run of successes by securing another away point with a 1-1 draw against SC Bastia. Bastia is a town on the island of Corsica. Even though Corsica is much closer to the Italian than to the French mainland, Corsica is part of France. Corsica was the birthplace of Napoleon and it was once briefly an independent republic but has been part of France since 1768.

For today's football match there was no video stream that I could find so I followed the game on the Live Update at the FC Nantes website. My French reading vocabulary, particularly as relates to football, continues to expand albeit slowly. My interpretation of the live update is that Nantes dominated the game and had many better scoring opportunities and some will be disappointed that they did not come away with a victory. However, the conventional wisdom in European football is that any away point is a good point. Nantes rises to first in the table pending the outcome of Caen's game on Monday night.

1 comment:

gfr said...

I think willow bark is where aspirin comes from? So at least we know what willow tastes like.