Hiatus

That's the longest I have gone without posting since I started posting, I think.  Maybe not but in any case it feels like it has been a long time.

I wasn't posting but I did do some riding.  It is only October, October is a full month of the 7 month riding season.  November is speculative but if you ride (and I do) then you ride in October.

Particularly in early October when we had some spectacularly nice days.

I have a bunch of photos.  I am just going to post them with probably mostly pretty brief comments and that is going to be it for now.  I think I may now be resuming the regular routine.

So here we go.

This one is early in the hiatus but it is still almost a month after the end of the Fair.  This POS has been locked to that street sign since the Fair ended.

The working hypotheses from this end of OUR STREET is that some citizen rode that bicycle to the Fair, but for whatever reason, accepted a ride home from a friend and now cannot remember where that damn bicycle is.

It's OK, losing that particular bicycle is no particular loss.

A couple of day later I got this one actually inside the Fairgrounds.

This is a different story.  Not locked, just leaned up against the post.

Someone stole that bicycle and just abandoned it when it was no longer useful.

I note that this one is also a Schwinn.  This one however, is an old school Chicago Schwinn, not really a very nice bicycle by modern standards but a nice bike in its day.  That other one above has never ever for even a second of its existence been anything other than a POS.

Lots of talk around here lately about oil trains.  Here is an oil train crossing 694 in Shoreview.

I did not attempt to count the cars but it was a big train, probably at least 100 cars.  It is interesting to me because the major concern as expressed in the newspapers is the Burlington Northern Santa Fe (forever hereafter in this blog BNSF) trains coming into the metro area from the northwest.

Here is a Great Northern digression, when I worked there the three giant freight trains leaving westbound each day were called by the yard crews by their destination.  There were two Willmars and a Saint Cloud leaving every evening.  And a couple of other Willmars and another Saint Cloud earlier in the day.

I several times worked the switchtender job at the Lyndale yards junction where the route was determined.  If the switch wasn't lined up correctly the Willmars would go to Saint Cloud and vice versa.

Much of the current brouhaha about oil trains in the city is because of that switching spot.  The BNSF hauls most of the oil and they are mostly using the Moorhead to Saint Cloud to Minneapolis routing.  Track maintenance this summer has caused a lot of the traffic to be switched over to a Willmar routing.  Trains coming from Willmar run through the most affluent section of Twin Cities suburbs.  Trains from Saint Cloud run through Anoka and Columbia Heights.

The point of this digression is that the tracks pictured above are Soo Line.  This isn't even the spots where people are concerned about big oil trains and yet a job with at least 100 cars ran through Shoreview that day.

So we had a visitor and she wanted to ride.  The regular GRider and I took her out on a spectacularly nice day to the nearby regional park (Como).

Pretty nice day in the park.  October 11 and short sleeves and shorts.

This is an angle towards Lake Como that I have used many times.  Every time is different.

Very nice today, I think most would agree.

I had an event in there which allowed me to buy myself a present.  I got a new camera.  Here is DSC_0001, the very first ever shot with the new equipment.

I already had a really nice camera but the old one did not do video.  It is a great camera, I could post that photo of the FT in front of our Paris apartment with Notre Dame in the background again, or any of the several Niagara Falls photos if you don't believe me, but that is a great camera.

But it doesn't do video and it appears that ability to do video is about to be important to me in a way that it has not previously been.

We had another ride on a day not as nice as the first day when we rode.  And yet in some ways it was at least as nice as the first day.  The weather wasn't quite as nice but the bicycling was spectacularly successful.

My riding companions at Lake Vadnais.

It was pretty out there that day.

Roseville is hilly.  No mountains, not making that claim.  Hilly.

And I have ridden a couple of times since.

This is within about a half a mile from home.  The corn fields are within a half a mile of home.  At this time of year there is a lot of corn on the ground after harvest.  The geese show up for the food.  And they also need water.

Name one person who might be reading this blog who doesn't love the cows.

Hiatus over.

I love my bicycle, I enjoy the photography and the writing.

Most probably, but not definitely, blogging will now resume on what was previously the normal schedule.

Further Gino saith not.