September, done!
I rode my 1954 Alvin Drysdale sports tourer, which is is modern compared to some of the old English bikes I ride; 72° frame angles, Simplex Tour-de-France five speed gearing, downtube shifter. Here's the bike in the afternoon:
The great thing about those old English bikes is the dynohub lighting that lets me start as early as I like; this one doesn't have any, and I couldn't even find my battery lights, so I didn't start out until the sun was almost up. About an hour out I passed a little pond and saw a blue heron hunkered down on the water overflow, so I stopped asap and got out my camera. You know how it is with a digital camera; you push the shutter and wait for it to take the picture, and hope the subject doesn't fly off first. Well, just the opposite happened; I push the button hoping to get a photo of the blue heron in the foreground, and then I see this activity in the background, which proves to be a white heron.
Then the blue heron flew up and scared the white heron away; it flew up and landed in a tree:
And I rode away. Until about 9 AM I got to the sand roads of the pinelands, my average moving speed had been 16.5 mph or so, but it's been pretty dry lately, and the first sand road I hit was so soft I could barely ride at first. I let a lot of air out of my tires (27 x 1 1/4 paselas) and was able to go on.
When I got to the end of that road I leaned the bike up against a tree to pump the tires back up, and guess what I saw on the tree:
And soon I was underway again, now on one of the rare narrow paved roads through the pines:
I also tried some roads so narrow that cars don't drive on them; and these, it turned out, are pretty good riding as well, though not very fast:
By afternoon I was out on the pavement again, heading back north:
After a lunch stop at Budds Farm farmstand, and later a flat tire (it was a thorn, right through the tread of the tire, despite a tire saver!) I got home at about 4:30. Screenshot of my route:
and stats:
