Nice Saturday in September

Every nice Saturday in September has an increased possibility of being the last nice Saturday of the year.

It was a plenty nice day for a bicycle ride and I took what is going down for this year as an epic ride.  That's good.  Approximately half the population of the metro area was also engaged in outdoor recreation.  That is also good but occasionally there were more people around than I am currently comfortable with.  More on that later.

A mostly southerly wind got me started off to the south.  My usual route takes me around the Fairgrounds on the east side but I have noticed that Como is torn up considerably beyond what I have previously reported, the project continues on west of Snelling all down the side of the Fairgrounds.  There appears to be pavement available but bicycles would have to share the lane with automobiles and the potential for that to end badly, especially on a weekend with the increased amount of traffic, so I didn't want to go that way.  I can get past the Fairgrounds on that route but with Como unavailable I can not get back to the west at that point.  All rides from that point head off to the east towards Como Park.  Today I adapted by cutting through the farm campus thereby staying on the west side of the Fair.

We have reached that point of the annual cycle when the natural lighting is magical.

This route gets me out of town and into the big city to the south much more rapidly than the normal route and I knew that I could penetrate much farther to the south than I had done previously.  For example:

Yes, indeed.  That's Minneapolis.  I was really close to the big attraction over there and I wanted to try to take a look.  It was a nice Saturday in September with far too many of my fellow citizens having that same idea but patience and a willingness to settle for the secondary viewing area means that I got this photo:

For once the autofocus worked for me.

I took my sitdown at 42nd and 42nd.

There is a school there, Longfellow, with lots of shade and a huge playground.

After that all I had to do was get home and I endeavored to persevere.  The long uphill on Pelham was daunting but as a family member explained earlier this year after arriving at our house on her bicycle, that hill is only long, it isn't really that steep.  You find a gear that you can turn and you turn it.

It ended up being a really nice Saturday in September.