Clear sky, cool temps, and SUNBEAMS

It was in August of last year that I stopped for sunbeams along this stretch of road, so I'm not surprised I'm stopping for sunbeams once again in August.

This image has a lot of blue light matching the sudden cool temps. Fall is on its way even though the dry air isn't here yet. Of course, we wouldn't have the sunbeams if there wasn't so much moisture in the air.

 

The few spots of light and warmth contrast with the coolness, a fitting visual for the sensations I felt riding through the shadows and bright spots.

As I travelled a few pedal strokes around the corner, the scene below unfolded.

 

These images are less than 100 yards and less than one minute apart, yet feel so different.

As I stopped to take these photos, a neighbor paused her walk to chat. How often can car commuters say this?

Commute Summary

Round Trip Distance: 18.7
Number of Cyclists seen: 30 (14 inbound and 16 outbound)
In-bound Route: Goofin' 9.6
Out-bound Route: Emory via Clifton
Weather: I was getting on my bike whether I came into the office or not. "Must ... Get ... Outside" sort of day.

Cycling through Forest; sometimes over it

Atlanta has lots of trees for an urban area, and this greatly improves the cycling experience. The lure of deep forest has not quite yet enticed me to get an off-road bike. In part, this is because I can spend a lot of time amongst the trees even while riding my road bike.

Sometimes however, the trees impose on the roadway.



Sunday evening, the rain was so hard, winds were being kicked up by the volume of rain coming down. The thunderstorm pushed things around even more so there were a few trees down. Statistically, a lot of trees to knock down means a lot of trees will come down.

And so, we're riding not only through the forest, but sometimes over pieces of it.

Commute Summary

Round Trip Distance: 18.7
Pace: Recovering from Sunday's Recovery Ride which was to recover from Saturday's Ride.
Number of Cyclists seen: 19 total, 3 in AM, 16 coming home.
In-bound Route: Goofin' 9.6
Out-bound Route: Emory via Clifton
Weather: Humid from the storm that came through the night before.

Making Way - Part 2

 

Barry had commented that the great big overhead limb was slowly sinking to where you couldn't fit under. The cyclist in the photo above (#4 on the day's commute) had to dismount to get under the limb on Friday (June 5).

By Monday afternoon, a crew cut out the limb and the limbo log was gone:

Commute Summary

Round Trip Distance: 18.7
Number of Cyclists seen: 18
In-bound Route: Goofin' 9.6
Out-bound Route: Emory via Clifton
Weather:Warm, but not as warm as usual for June

Make way for Bicycles

 

Don't they know May is National Bicycle Month? Whenever a tree falls across a bicycle facility during National Bicycle Month, a path should be cleared within 18 hours. This was more like 18 days.

I am kidding because it was no big deal to take a detour for a couple of weeks. Riding the other side of Candler Park allowed my path to overlap Mike's path. He's a professor at Georgia Tech with whom I've ridden along to the office on occasion.

I like to include this picture for a couple of reasons:

1. It's cool how you go under one of the branches.
   
2. It shows -- despite almost no photo evidence on this blog to the contrary -- that I do ride in the rain.
   

Here are a couple of panoramas. This first taken from the bridge shows how backed up the stream has gotten from the tree limbs blocking the flow.



This second panorama shows the length of the tree alongside the path. Bicycle is directly under the overhead branch.

Commute Summary

Round Trip Distance: 17.1
Number of Cyclists seen: 11 (numbers do drop when it rains)
In-bound Route: Lullwater/PATH trail
Out-bound Route: Emory via Clifton
Weather: Repeated stretches of rain

Tree Climbing on my Commute

It's unusual to see more cyclists in the morning than the afternoon, but then, on the afternoon's route, the cyclists had to climb over fallen trees. The one blocking the PATH trail would make a good cyclo-cross course.

Three trees on Clifton were down within a few hundred yards.

These came down during Monday morning's storm. I've taken pictures of the ones blocking my path, but many others were also down. More storms on the way. Perhaps more tree climbing on my way to the office.

Commute Summary

Round Trip Distance: 19.8
Number of Cyclists seen: 15 inbound, 10 outbound.
In-bound Route: Goofin' 9.6 with detour around fallen tree
Out-bound Route: Emory via Clifton (climbed over the tree on the way back)
Weather: humid and warm

Spring Photo Negligence

 

For several days in a row, I've been in a rush to get somewhere, telling myself that yes, that scene or this scene would make a good photo, but I'll need to stop and pull the camera out some other day. I got tired of hearing myself tell that same story.

This is at the corner of Clifton and Clifton East. There is just a bit of late afternoon sun backlighting some of the branches.

Commute Summary

Round Trip Distance: 18.7
Number of Cyclists seen: 17 (riding outside of rush hour both inbound and outbound)
In-bound Route: Goofin' 9.6
Out-bound Route: Emory via Clifton
Weather: Just the way I like it: mild enough for shorts and no jacket.

Nature on my Mind

 

Fellow Bike Commuter Jeff McMichael shared a post from Boston.com about how the city hurts your brain and how nature fixes it. I agree with this completely but it got me thinking about an amusement I find myself enjoying: pretending I live in trees and following the twists and turns of branches to make my way around. There must be some part of the brain that connects with twisty-turning paths through the trees -- or at least my brain.

In the photo, in addition to the branches, there are phone and power cables. These are the straight-line highways. They're great for getting from point A to point B, but while playing the game, these are only interesting so I can get to another tree, perhaps as a bridge across the street (so I don't have to touch the ground).

This makes me think of bike routes. Certainly we appreciate getting from point A to point B efficiently, but it's far more enjoyable to take the twisty-turning path. Since I live in the trees, that's where I find my food, take naps and escape from the cat. The power cable is no place to sit. You get on and get off. Just like the interstate, the sooner, the better. The highway itself isn't interesting. It's where it brings you that is interesting. And like many of my bike routes, I'll suffer a busy road to get to low-traffic streets with lots of trees. Just like the article says, my brain needs this.

Silver Lake

We're always trying out new routes on Sunday mornings and this was one of our better days. We spent time just outside the west by northwest side of the perimeter highway near the river and found some pleasant riding. We then headed northeast through Buckhead and the Governor's Mansion to Silver Lake and then Brookhaven.

Silver Lake is a road to get your turned around so you don't know which way you're heading. We like going there when it's windy because the trees shelter you. Today, however, it provides that sun dappled road that I like.

The photos are blurry because we're moving at about 18 MPH through these sharp turns. Lots of fun and considerably more interesting when you're trying to take pictures at the same time. On some of these, it looks like I'm almost off the road. I may have been close to falling off!

Here's a map of the "fingers" you follow around the southern side of the lake:

 

Stopping by Woods on my Way to Work

This park is a half-mile from my house. My daughters both learned sliding boards and swings here as well as practicing soccer skills and building sand castles. We've played chase, hide-and-seek, and stopped at the water fountain after running a few miles. It's been our neighborhood park.

This morning I saw it anew. The sun was just right. The air smelled just right. The stars were aligned.

My bicycle wheel just kept going around the park until the goodness had filled me to overflowing.

Commute Summary

Round Trip Distance: 24.8
Number of Cyclists seen: 5 inbound and 25 outbound.
In-bound Route: Orme Park then Lullwater/PATH Trail
Out-bound Route: Inman Park, Kirkwood, Oakhurst, Decatur then back through Emory Village.
Weather: whoa

Air you can see

 

I'm such a sucker for sunbeams.

I took a slightly different route this morning that brought me past this wooded stretch of road. The sunbeams were irresistible.

Now, Atlanta isn't known for the best air. A million 30-mile automobile commutes each day will toss a few particles into the air, but most of the particles catching light in this photo are water droplets not yet burned off by the heat of the day. It's an otherwise invisible fog revealed by light and shade's contrast.

If you didn't grow up with this humidity, your body may take a while to adjust. My body likes the moisture almost as much as the trees do. The sunbeams allow me to visibly measure how much of this good thing I'm getting. The sunbeams are also showing you how happy the trees are.

I like smoky sunbeams too. Those have a pleasant smell, but on this morning, the moisture amplifies the smell of the few remaining plants that are blooming.

I hope I don't see any smoke-less sunbeams on dry days, but I'll probably still stop to take a picture.

Commute Summary

Round Trip Distance: 18.8
Number of Cyclists seen: 24
In-bound Route: Lullwater/PATH trail with extension over to University
Out-bound Route: Emory via Clifton with extension over to Sage Hill
Weather: Mild and moist on the way in; somewhat drier air, but still warm on the way home.

Cyclists can benefit from Urban Sprawl

Whether you've never visited Atlanta or lived here for 30 years, you can't help but notice how spread out it is. There are no natural boundaries, so new sub-divisions keep springing up further and further out from the city's center.

The average commute by car exceeds 30 miles -- for years I traveled close to this distance daily -- which was further than a trip to our family's summer home from the house where I grew up.

The spread is bad for air quality and also the quality of the commute, but it also means lots of roads to explore on bike.

We rode southeast of town this morning along some familiar roads, but also several roads I've never been on. There's a 50-mile loop that takes us through 4 counties that we like. It only takes about 30 minutes to get out of the city and onto low-traffic roads with lots of shade. Coming back, there is a substantial amount of climbing along River Road and Bouldercrest, so we tried finding a different route back into town. This brought us down a whole set of roads I've never traveled down, lakes I've never seen, High Schools I've only heard of, and neighborhoods with different personalities.

What I find impressive is I've lived here 30 years, we ride almost every week, and we're going down new roads all the time. SO many roads, so little time.

Even though so many people have to drive so far to get to work, it is a delight to discover new places to go and new roads to ride.

Oh, we did have to make up that elevation eventually, so we only managed to substitute one set of hills for another. White Oak needs to go on our Dirty Dozen list of hills.

Lullwater Shade Tunnel

When I go to heaven, it's going to be like this. I'm riding my bike along a quiet road with a few other walkers and cyclists, the sun is filtered by a tunnel of trees, the air is cool and crisp, except the left-most portion of the image won't be a little out of focus. I rushed to get the pedestrian in the photo before the traffic came by and captured the wrong focal distance on the first frame of my stitched panorama.

This is Lullwater. Even the name is restful. It's part of my daily commute and one of the big reasons I start my commute by heading in the opposite direction of the office. It runs by a creek and on the other side of the creek and trees is a golf course. This shade tunnel stays cool even at the height of summer.

At night, the lack of streetlights gives you the impression you're far away from town. That's when I like to run along this road and listen to the creatures in the woods.

In this image, you should find the bridge crossing the creek. The small concrete bridge isn't as easy to pick out as the weight-limit sign at its foot. There is also an approaching cyclist. I didn't catch the other cyclist that was 50 yards behind.

For those that are movie buffs, this is just down the road from the house they filmed for "Driving Miss Daisy". There may have been some shots along this stretch in the movie.

Certainly the moments and impressions I treasure have changed over the years, but making my way along this road has always been a favorite.

Commute Summary

Round Trip Distance: 17.4
Number of Cyclists seen: 23
In-bound Route: Lullwater/PATH trail
Out-bound Route: Emory via Clifton
Weather: Wow! Sky goes all the way up and cool, crisp air. What a break from last week.

Is this not Spring in Atlanta?

Commute Summary

Round Trip Distance: 11.6
Number of Cyclists seen: 9
In-bound Route: Lullwater/PATH trail
Out-bound Route: Piedmont Park
Weather: Drizzly, cold clouds, fog in the morning, rain in the afternoon.

Pink Snow

 

Despite the cold drizzly weather, the trees continue to bloom. Here's a shower of pink covering the sidewalk at John Howell Park in Virginia-Highland.

Here's a wider angle shot.

Bradford Pears are Blooming

 

This intersection at Central Park and Ralph McGill is one of a few intersections on my daily commute that coincides with the course for the Tour de Georgia Circuit race April 27. (Barry has added some interesting commentary to this route in bikely.com.) Cyclists will make a right turn and pass from right to left in this image.

I took this photo to put a date on the first blooming of the Bradford Pear trees.

Commute Summary

Round Trip Distance: 15.2
Number of Cyclists seen: 15 (outside of rush hour on both ends)
In-bound Route: Lullwater/PATH trail
Out-bound Route: (abbreviated) Emory via Clifton
Weather: Sunny and Mild - Should have worn shorts

A Fun, Social, Recreational Christmas Tree Ride

There was nothing utility about this ride. Pure recreation.


When I was growing up, I calculated the speed at which a single Santa would have to fly and deduced that there must be a whole army of Santa's. We had two assigned to leading our ride.

In keeping with Christmas Tree Bicycle tradition, we also had reindeer and elves.



Cycling Santa was good about leading us to houses with lots of lights, to friends with lights and refreshments, and to bars where he could get us free shots of Jaegermeister. We must have been good cyclists this past year.

More photos here.

Slow, Steady Train

Despite the number of different people I see riding the Wednesday Bike Train route, I'm not sure we'll ever have even 10 people riding together. On the other hand, our Sunday Morning group ride often carried much fewer than 10 for several years. Now we typically get at least a dozen and a couple dozen on good days. The encouraging news is there has only been one day out of the last 7 weeks that no one joined me on the ride.

This morning I was accompanied by Amy, a Ga Tech student studying Civil Engineering. She has a full appreciation of communities whose amenities are within easy walking and cycling distance. It is an idea whose time has come.

I haven't posted a panorama in a while. I had made a few recent attempts, but this is the only one that I've been pleased with.



The bridge in the lower right-hand corner reminds me of the winter of 1982. I was a student at Tech at the time and we were in the middle of Snow Jam. A sudden afternoon snow storm caught many people downtown and everybody joined in a big party across the city. All the roads were blocked with stranded cars so lots of people were walking everywhere.

Several of my best memories occurred during those few snowed-in days, but the "sledding" day is near the top. We took sheets of linoleum down to Candler Park (pictured here) and slid down the 1/4 mile hill that ended at the bridge you see in the panorama. We tried over and over to steer a sheet of slippery flatness across that bridge without falling into the water. The hill is out of view to the right of the bridge.

Most of the steering involved picking the initial fall line because the best you could do with your feet or hands was keep your head facing the trees you wanted to avoid. About half-way down the slope was a ridge you would disappear over. On Graham's turn, we watched him disappear over the ridge and then turned our eyes to watch if he would cross the bridge. We didn't see exactly what happened, but what we could see gave us a pretty good idea. One of the dogwood trees whose top was all we could see, had the snow shaken loose. This observation fit well with our next observation: an empty piece of linoleum sliding across the bridge.

Commute Summary

Round Trip Distance: 17.8
Number of Cyclists seen: 37 - A very good number
In-bound Route: Wednesday Bike Train
Out-bound Route: Emory via Clifton
Weather: 57 in AM, 70s in afternoon. Mostly sunny.

Counting Cyclists

Evan recently posted in his Atlanta By Bike blog about the pollen that has been dumped on Atlanta and this ties in with my photo documenting one way I can count how many cyclists are ahead of me on the road. You can see several bike tracks in the pollen. What I'll do next year is take another photo and compare how many tracks I find.

I was in Intown Bicycles on Monday replacing a tire and was talking with owner Mike Goodman about the number of cyclists. He says his sales season is getting off to a great start and he's hearing stories about more commuters hitting the roads. Maybe we are reaching a tipping point.

Excessively nice mornings

This morning is so frickin' gorgeous, I, I ... I'm afraid I'm just gonna have to sing.



I'm trying to make everyone jealous who doesn't get to ride their bike on mornings like this. Photos stitched from multiple images taken this morning on my way in. I was lucky to catch a fellow commuter at the right side of the image above.

Looking at these images makes me want to go right back out there again. Maybe tomorrow.

Tree that Babe Ruth put a baseball in

Yesterday I ran an errand on my way home from work. Looking for better bike access to the shopping center, I wound my way along the tracks behind the shopping center, and came across the Center-Field Magnolia.

The story behind this tree concerns the Atlanta Crackers, their ballpark, and the only ground rule in baseball history that included a tree in center field.

The shopping center has been built on the grounds of Atlanta's old Ponce de Leon Park, home of the Atlanta Crackers. The stands were taken down when Atlanta built Fulton County Stadium as part of bringing the Braves to Atlanta and now we have a shopping center.

While searching for a photo of the tree sitting in center-field, I came across the blog of another local who has run across the tree.

I also came across this aerial photo probably taken around 1960. This photo shows the ballpark's orientation relative to the large building now used as City Hall East, and also known as the old Sears Building. The magnolia is probably the tree that can barely be seen at the lower right corner.

One of the merchants in the shopping center has placed this plaque at the base of the tree. It doesn't mention Babe Ruth, but this article does.