Destination ride

This one definitely counts as a destination ride, Lake Vadnais in April.

If the truth be known I have been out there earlier in April in other years.  I have been there when the snow pack still blocked the road (when there was a road).  I have been there with ice in the lake, one magical day a few years ago I was there as the wind piled the rapidly disintegrating ice along the near side shore with ice out happening right in front of me.

But it's the first time this year to a place where I ride a lot, a place I often have as a goal when I set out.  You know, a destination.

Nearly weightless bicycle and recycling location for scale.

I must say that's quite optimistic of the parks people, thinking that people are going to carry their containers down the lake to that spot for recycling.  Note:  unseen but nearby at camera right is a traditional trash container, another flash of optimism and faith in humanity which I do not share.  I expect them to throw the empties into the lake.

I don't want them to, but I do expect that that is what too many of them WILL do.

The morning newspaper reports that the large city immediately to our south will begin street sweeping on Monday.  This is a bit of a cautionary note for me as it's always a bit of a hassle for me the way they do it.  From a bicyclist's stand point they put too much water down.  Riding down a newly swept street is like following behind a rain storm.  In fact, three hours after the sweeping the street is usually still wet in spots where the sun isn't prominent.

I haven't been down into the big city yet this season.  It looks like my first foray will involve dodging the water trucks.

That's OK though, after a bit the streets will have been swept and I am totally FOR that.

Long time no football news.  FC Nantes had slipped dangerously near the relegation zone until quite recently.  The team's last three outings have been twice against teams actually currently in the red zone and a home match up against league power Marseille.  Nantes reversed recent spotty form and secured victories against both of the teams going down and yesterday managed a second half equalizer to tie Marseille 1-1 and as a result have actually risen to 10th in the table.

With three games remaining FC Nantes will remain in Ligue 1 if current 18th place (the last relegation spot) Sochaux-Montbéliard is unable to secure a victory in tomorrow's home game against league champion Paris Saint-Germain. PSG has 25 wins and only 2 losses to this point in the season while Sochaux-Montbéliard has 8 wins and 17 losses. PSG won the earlier meeting between the two by 5-0 so it is safe to start being optimistic about another season in Ligue 1 for FC Nantes.

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)

Stretch

Lots of early season rides are loops, hoping for mileage but not ever straying a huge straight line distance from the garage where all rides begin.  The deal is you have to be sure you can get home before you ride very far away.

So today I ventured farther away from home than I had been previously and rode out to the Shoreview water tower.

That's also a construction update.  Some may remember late last fall that the strip mall that used to be across the street from and between Island Lake and the water tower disappeared, and actually so did the street.

The street now runs behind this big thing meaning that the new six story apartment building can advertise itself as being on the lakeshore.

But the road has been reestablished on the back side and there is once again a way through there.

There's a couple of other things about a ride to the Shoreview water tower.  First, as most will know, I start all rides out into the wind.  This makes the first half of the ride harder but on the other hand for the second half of the ride I am tired and I wouldn't want to be facing the wind with fatigue coming on.  Start is ALWAYS into the wind.

Second, that thing is a water tower and as we all know, water towers are located . . . on top of hills.

That means that today's early season ride to the Shoreview water tower was uphill into the wind at a distance on the outer fringes of my fitness level.

A stretch.

My leg strength is returning nicely but the whole oxygen producing apparatus is still a bit (a fair bit) behind.

Probably also of note is this first photo of the year of Lake Owasso.  This one is from the south end.

It is quite apparent that I have missed that whole ice out thing this year.  Lake Owasso is not only ice free but it has also advanced into the recreational boating season.

I'm OK with that but I really would like some foliage.  You know, leaves on the trees.

Stretching is good.

Resume

Yesterday was by far the nicest day so far with temperatures topping out in the middle 70s or so and without much in the way of wind.

But I didn't ride.  The resumption of the season came today.  It wasn't quite as nice and the wind howled.

Still, any day on the bicycle is a good day and today was a good day.

It was so nice yesterday that it got me to thinking about when we are going to see signs of life from the plant life here on the tundra.  I set out to visit the three different shrubs which have over the past several seasons been the first sign of plants coming back to life.  These are those shrubs which get white flowers before they get leaves and before anything else gets leaves.

Not yet.  Here's the one that looked the most promising but really, not yet.

So maybe one last bow to winter.  It was so awful here that the local news reported that local units of government were in danger of using up all of the road salt that they had on hand and that acquiring additional would be absurdly expensive.

Roseville went with crushed rock at the end of our street.

The crushed rock hasn't gone very far.  Street sweeping is going to get lots of that but the stuff plowed up into the yard isn't going to be within range of the sweepers.  This isn't even the largest concentration but it is a spot that well demonstrates that for all of the yards up at that end of the street this is not going to be a summer for going bare foot.  Those things are sharp.

This looks like spring

Not the same photo, this one is new

We got off easy this time.  I was out today and spoke to a person who described her residence as "north metro".  She reported 13 inches at her house, she got stuck trying to get out of the driveway to come down here to go to work.

Apparently where we live is just off the southern edge of what is referred to as "the heavy stuff".

The temperature this afternoon is hovering near 40 so some of this is hanging on and will still be here in the morning.  50 tomorrow though, bicycling will resume soon.

A no sun day

Because, first off, it is fairly obviously Saturn's day.

But additionally after some overnight rain the overcast never parted. It was about as grey as it can possible be.

It was coolish but the wind was from a new direction (mostly east) and not very punitive.  After some initial reluctance I got a late start.

See, grey.

As previously reported Como has lots of open water.  Como is a sort of kidney shaped lake and this shot is down at the south lobe of the bean.  The last stern wind we had was from the north which moved the remaining ice pack all down to this end.

It may look completely ice covered but down at the other end of the bean there was only open water.  I am going to estimate about 60 percent still iced over.

As I said I got a bit of a late start and it was cooler than any previous ride this year.  I am not usually anywhere near the Cattle Barn this late in the day.

But it is Saturn's day so the usual patterns are already disrupted.  Plus I have the gear to easily withstand 51.  Today I wore the new orange Castelli.

That arch thing has been moved up to the top of the columns.

Sunset has come and gone without any evidence in today's sky of the actual sun.

A no sun day.

Two crews

It does seem awfully early in the season to be revisiting spots that I have already ridden to this spring (there, I said it, spring).  But I wanted to go by the place where I saw the street sweepers to confirm if actual sweeping was taking place.

And indeed there was.  I actually saw two completely different crews sweeping.  I took a video.

I want everyone to notice that the pesky user error issues I used to have with videos have been solved.

I rode on down to Lake Josephine, my first lake visit of the season.  This is more like what the lakes around here look like, mostly ice, probably still fairly substantial ice.

Probably unnecessary to point out that it was a really nice day out there today (yes, I said spring).

As I was circling back towards home I came across the pond behind the DOT building on Snelling.  Again, this one is really only a pond but it is already completely ice free.

Yup, golf course, and yup, there was somebody playing glof.

It maybe got to 70 again and with rain predicted for overnight I suspect that this is the last day that we will have any snow in the front yard.

For perspective it is worth noting that last Friday morning I had to run the snowblower as we had had a foot (A FOOT) of snow overnight.

I know everyone loves these as much as I do so here you go, my first attempt to take the above photo.

The little dial thing on the camera somehow got displaced from "Auto" while the camera was being replaced in my jersey pocket after taking the golf course photo.

By the way, I figured out a way to stop that really, really annoying YouTube autoplay when displaying YouTube videos on blogger. But it ain't easy. You have to edit the HTML.

We hold these truths to be self-evident

No, actually I have no intention of probing into the Declaration of Independence here.  Watch out though, there may just be a political jibe.  Just for fun.

No, where I am going is that at this time of year it is self evidently true that a predominantly north wind is chillier than a predominantly south wind.

The sun was out again today, it was nice.  From inside the house it looked a lot like yesterday, sunny and a little too windy.  Turned out it WAS a little too windy.  AND it had shifted directions.  Yesterdays SW wind produced a call of 70, nice and warm.  Today the wind was NW and I am not going to call even 60, at least not 60 during the time I was out there, windy and quite cool.

But I have the gear and 57 or so (Heinz reference designed to appall known conservatives) really is not a problem.  I wore a different jacket.  Yesterday I had on my new mostly orange Specialized that I got in Michigan.  Today I donned my new mostly orange Castelli that I got a really good deal on from Bike Tires Direct.  Yeah, go figure, a close out on jackets at Bike Tires Direct.

Orange is the new orange.

The ride went OK though, and as I expected it was a bit easier today.  I actually got all the way to the total of miles I rode yesterday before my shoulders started to complain.  At one point I was riding at a speed greater than 20mph.

Progress.

And progress here too.

The same car radio segment that yesterday produced information on yesterday's high temperature informed me that average ice out for lakes around here is April 17-19.  I would not really expect lakes to be clear earlier than average given that as we all know this past winter was the WORST EVER.  But I rode by that pond and the ice is in significant retreat.  It really isn't a lake though, it is a pond.

The big news though is this.  On my second ride of the season I came across the first street sweeper.

That particular street is nowhere near where I live but it fairly obviously is within riding distance, even my pretty pitiful early season riding distance.

Last season I got my lowest total ever on my spring larger and lower pressure tire bicycle partly because I had only been out on it a few times before the streets were suddenly swept clean.  It is starting to look like another low mileage year for the spring bicycle.

Good grief

The morning newspaper reports that the last time we experienced a temperature of 70 degrees here was October 11.  Which without necessarily checking the log indicates to me that it has been nearly 6 months since the last time I had a hard ride.

Today's efforts rather conclusively established that my fitness regime since then has been . . . well, insufficient.

Ride report?  Good grief, that was hard.

The first ride of the year is always a bit of a scramble/scavenger hunt.  I have all of the gear and it is all somewhere here in this house but locating all of the appropriate bits is the scavenger hunt bit.  The clothing is mostly in one spot, the shoes somewhere else, which socks, the helmet somewhere else, which pair of gloves, glove liners? helmet liner, which jacket is the appropriate one for the conditions.  Next up comes the test equipment scramble phase.  I needed a new battery for the cycle computer and I had to pump the tires.  I had a spare battery on hand (I am cyclist, hear me roar) although as most will know a new battery calls for complete reprogramming of the computer, and I do, of course, have about three options for pumping the tires.  There was also just a tiny bit of a panic before I located the water bottles.  It is perhaps worth noting that on last year's first ride I was about 3.5 miles from home before I realized that a) I would be wanting a drink at the 5 mile mark and b) I didn't actually have any water with me.

I chose gear that figured to be too warm at 70 and the results at the cattle barn demonstrated the wisdom of that choice.

Besides everything else there is still plenty of snow visible there on the north (sheltered from the sun) side of the barn.  It turns out that the official temperature may fall just shy of 70 (I heard 68 on the car radio when I was traveling to and from the grocery store) but I am still calling 70, we had 71 on our front yard digital outside measurement FM signal delivery to an inside display (popularly referred to I believe as indoor/outdoor) thermometer.  70 it is.

The gear worked out well as I had a no perspiration no chills ride, exactly what every cyclist aspires to, particularly at this time of year.

The ride had been going so poorly up to that moment pictured above at the CB that I was actually really pleased with myself to have persevered well enough to reach the Fairgrounds.  On the route I rode today I was nearly 8 miles out when I arrived at the Cattle Barn.

I am the local chronicler of all things Fairgrounds so I today report the on going construction establishing the new location for that welcome to the State Fair arch that there has been such a fuss about.

The arch is visible there just beyond the new posts upon which I assume it will be mounted.  Most people will recognize the jumping off point for the Skyride.  All of that Heritage Square business that used to be to the left of the Skyride has been demolished and replaced with a pretty heavy duty construction site.

The scuttlebutt is that a new transportation hub and welcome to the Fairgrounds center is what is being constructed there.

I took the short way home from there.

The first day is the hardest and the first day is now behind me.  I expect the second day to be at least easier, maybe not a lot, but at least easier.  And I don't expect my shoulders to feel so completely unused to the position as they felt today.  But mostly I rode as far as I possibly could, occasionally feeling as though I couldn't continue for even another pedal stroke.  Perhaps not too surprisingly as exhaustion approached I uncannily began to feel a certain rhythm settling in.  I have done this before.

Worst winter ever now will not end

I opened up my bike log today.  Not because I had any entry to make or anything like that.  I just wanted to confirm the stinking suspicion that I have that this spring is already well on its dangerous way to being as bad as last spring.

Two years ago I rode 252 miles in MARCH.  Last year I rode 164 in April.  Last April I got my first ride in on the 8th but the second did not come until the 24th.

Here are a few entries from between those two dates:

9th: rain and snow mix
10th: snow
11th: lots of snow
12th: flurries
13th: rain and snow
14th: morning snow
18th: 6 more inches
19th: more like 8
22nd: another 6 inches

Beginning last evening and ending this morning we got about a foot here.

Before it all started yesterday we had a bare rear deck and could see most of the back yard.

*sigh*

It melted pretty fast today though and we at least have a useable driveway.  At least until the next event.

Just as the fun was getting underway yesterday one of the  children living in the neighborhood was using the unusual combination of still warm street and just beginning to accumulate sticky snow to inscribe messages in the roadway.

And she was right, great is what we WERE doing.

Perhaps we will be doing great again soon.