LOOK on the road

We had a couple of days of rain here.  Rain is in my view ALWAYS a hindrance to bicycling but it is doubly so when the temperature is hovering around 40.  Wet is rude, cold and wet is just plain uncivilized.

But today promised better.

I was poking around the internet when I heard the sound of heavy equipment from the street outside.  Friday is trash pick up and every other Friday is recycling so both of those large containers were out in the cul de sac waiting for heavy equipment to come on by and take that stuff away.

On a side note we have single stream recycling now, everything goes in the one big bin.  Single stream is a good thing.  Boy, it sure cuts down on stewing about whether that plastic container has the right number in the little triangle on the back.  Plus suddenly our recycling about equals our trash.  Except that the trash, now about half a container full, gets picked up every week.  The recycling, much closer to a full barrel, gets picked up every other week.

Next logical step in the process is for the city to select a single hauler for trash.  We have about five trucks down our street every Friday the way it is now, not an efficient system.

End of lengthy trash and recycling digression.

I don't have to go to work on Fridays so I am home most often for the trash and recycling pick ups.  The sound of heavy equipment this morning sounded to me like something other than the usual.  I dashed up the stairs and had time to grab my cheap pocket camera to record this thing going past the front of my house.

Well . . . now we're getting somewhere.  I won't ride my nice bicycle until the streets are at least mostly swept.  I looked at my bike log and noticed that last year my first ride on my nice bicycle was on April 27.  It appears to me that we are right on schedule then.

I had previously pumped half of the tires on NewLOOK (the rear if you must know, the bicycle was positioned in my basement headed in towards the basement wall and getting at the front wheel was a bigger hassle than I wanted to deal with at that tire pumping moment).  All I had to do was haul the bicycle up the stairs and out the door, pump the front and I was on the road.

I'm here going to repeat what I say every year at this time.  Geez, that thing is light, light as a feather.  The bike I have been riding is also in the lighter weight range to be sure but the contrast when I haul this one up the stairs strikes me every single time.  It weighs almost nothing at all.

So, what did I find?

Well, the city streets have all pretty much been swept.  The major arterial streets, however, are not maintained by the city, they are mostly CSAH*, county highways. They haven't been swept but they have enough automobile traffic to mostly have beat the detritus of winter far enough back towards the curb to allow bicycling between the white line and the edge of the crud.

I'm on the road.

I got past the Shoreview water tower, this is my first photo of the year of what could at least loosely be called a destination.  I am on the trail bridge over the freeway where the trail dives down into Snail Lake Regional Park at the edge of Grass Lake.

That's Grass Lake.

It is also a commentary.  It is lucky I don't have to work on Fridays as today looks like a really crummy day to trying to travel east to west across the northern suburbs.

But no worries, today is not a regularly scheduled work day for me.

*county state aid highways (something I learned at work)