Acorn Park

Today returned to merely summer instead of yesterday's hottest day since last July.  It was plenty warm enough for a ride and for a change I was able to take one without it feeling like a near death experience.

I headed north again.  I am still unhappy with the little greasy bits on the road along the usual route.  I know about them because I have ridden that bit on the return trip a couple of times.  The return trip is acceptable because the heaviest concentration of road construction detritus is across the street on the side ridden on the outbound leg.  Still, even across the street it is apparent to me that it will be at least a couple more weeks.

So the outbound leg is the shortcut route.  I have ridden it enough times that now seemed like a good time to start refining things a bit.  I started looking for flatter bits.

The revelation is Acorn Park.

I noticed the Park last time out there.  It seemed unlikely though as from the outside it looked like a paved road leading into a parking lot and then a mostly undeveloped park behind the parking lot.  I did some research on the city Parks and Recreation website and some research on Google and Yahoo Maps.  All indications were that there is a paved path meandering around the edge of the park with a dirt path providing a connection from parking lot directly across the park to paved street pretty much back onto the route I wanted to ride.

I thought that I should check and if the dirt path was reasonably short and if the surface was reasonably hard packed that I could ride that bit and go ahead and use the Park.

Well, they have paved the path.

It IS in the middle of a disc golf course but I only had one close encounter with a flying disc.  So, improvements have been made.

There was a little chop on the water at Vadnais today but there were lots of interesting shades of blue.

I came across this evidence that the drought is a thing of the past here.  There is almost never any water visible in the Snail Lake wetland.  I sometimes ride the MUT through there.  Today I almost had to abandon.

So just to recount some important EuroNews that I am likely to start referring to here from time to time.  Contador wins the Giro d'Italia after suffering a double dislocation of the shoulder in a crash late in Stage 6.  He is now being dogged by accusations that he staged a fake puncture on Stage 16 to change bikes to prevent discovery of the fact that he had a motor in the bike.

*sigh*

FC Nantes survived the Ligue 1 season, finishing comfortably clear of relegation and will return next season for a third run with the elite of French futbol.

Meanwhile the FIFA Women's World Cup is underway in Canadia, being played apparently exclusively, at least every game I have seen so far, on artificial turf.