Originally Posted by TheDL
Mornin' everyone.
Here's a helpful reminder for those of you who are riding in the dark now and using halogen lights. Becareful riding with your mouth open while riding in the dark, with your halogen on. Why? Because bugs are attracted to your light. I came VERY close to having a nice big, fuzzy moth in my mouth this morning. Luckily it hit my lip. I had several others hit my hands as I was riding.
Other than that; all is well. Still fairly warm here in Oregon in the mornings; mid 50's.
Well, I think I've dodged work enough.
Well, I don't know if last year's 20 mile round-trip commute in lovely Victoria BC counts as a VLC, perhaps a VSLC (somewhat long?), but one of the highlights for sure was biking home after a gruelling 12 to 15 hour day (a crazy little indie feature I was working on there) from View Royal up to Saanich, first on the deserted and paved Galloping Goose (reclaimed railbed), then the equally deserted hard-packed Lochside Trail (reclaimed hillibilly tractor dragstrip). Now these are all wonderful MUPs, but after midnight they were my-exclusive-use-paths. Nights were as black as ink though, and the three-LED white blinkie in the front of the bike wasn't worth cr*p, as I discoved after numerous ditch-dunks and a few close calls with a certain bridge over Belkinsop Lake. A 10W Halogen helmet-mount soon fixed that, even if it made me look kind of strange in the daytime... I soon discovered an amusing side-effect of using the light at night however (other than being able to see where I was going!): bugs. Lots and lots of huge juicy bugs, heading straight for my blazing head. I got pretty good at keeping my head angled just so they would bounce mostly off the front of the helmet, and wearing clear-lensed glasses for the rest. But here's the cool side-effect to the bug side-effect: bats! Lots and lots of crazy dive-bombing bats, gunning for the bugs. The crazy ones would dive straight at the light, coming up behind the bugs and whatnot and nearly startling me off the path into the woods. The really cool ones were the ones who would match my speed and direction and then weave back and forth about five to fifteen feet ahead of me, just chowing down in the beam of my light, nailing the critters high and low as they dove towards oblivion.
Now I'm back in the concrete jungle of a daily Vancouver-Burnaby run, and I sure miss the nightly dance of the bats. That, and the mist rising off Blenkisop Lake at midnight, with the bullfrogs calling to a gibbous moon, as I stopped for a squirt of water on the boardwalk.