Island Lake travelogue

OOTNDITHOD.

I got started a bit earlier today for reasons which are of complete insignificance to a bicycling blog.  I rode out towards Island Lake again.  Despite the opinion of TOPWLH I am not totally satisfied with that riding down the trail shot from yesterday.  The sunlit portion of the trail seems overexposed to me.  I have lots of retouching tools available, maybe I will try them.  But fundamentally I am a Luddite and I thought I could go out there again and work with the light conditions to achieve a better exposure.  Leaving a bit earlier was part of the plan, be there at a different time when the sun angle is slightly different.

Here is the entrance to the park.  It seems quite rural but the position where I was standing to take this photo was with my back to and within about 3 feet of one of the more heavily traveled arterial streets out in that part of the world.

Just across the street is a giant supermarket (Cub if you must know) and a strip mall.  Just off to my left is a SuperTarget.

That little wooden bridge/walkway bumps over a wetland where today there was running water heading into a drain just behind LOOK.

It is uphill for a ways and then just over the crest the trail descends back down to swamp level, standing water both left and right here.  I like the way they have left the blow down in place.

I tried from a little bit farther back for mostly the same shot as yesterday.  I am pleased but not yet satisfied.  I may have to open Picasa or something.

Today I rode all the way around into the park and took the reverse of yesterday's photo.  That's the fishing dock that I featured yesterday as seen from the other side of the lake.

Maybe just to the right of the dock you can make out the figure of a solitary individual.  That was an old guy standing down by the boat landing with a fly rod.

Fly rod on an urban lake seemed like a charming anachronism to me.  I rode back over that way and he really wasn't terribly skilled although as someone who once tried it, that is NOT easy and he was WAY better than I ever was.

The final bit of news from today is related to that street that I was so worried about when out with the GRider last weekend.

I said something would work itself out and something has.  The new pavement is already in.  Everyone loves new pavement.

There were cars driving on it, I could have ridden my bicycle on it but I decided not to.  Maybe you can see or maybe not but that pavement is the first layer of two.  Where the new pavement buts up against the old pavement there in the foreground you can perhaps see that there is still an inch or so dropoff from old to new.  Further, that pavement is SO new that it seems likely to me that it is still a tiny bit sticky.

It was such a beautiful day that the last thing I wanted to do was spend several minutes cleaning little tiny oil coated pebbles off my tires.

Then there is this little bit of interesting minutiae from what I did after the thing that induced me to ride early.

There is a dollar store at the strip mall where I had to go this afternoon.  I discovered last winter that this particular dollar store has our brand.  In addition, the nearby supermarkets either do NOT have our brand or if they do have it they only have it in small packages (3 rolls? really?) or in the "soft" variation.  At the dollar store this product is 12 rolls for $10.  Last winter I could not find a single supermarket that offered this exact product at less than $1 per roll.  As long as the dollar store has inventory they have a customer.

OOTNDITHOD.