clickie clickie clickie clickie

[solarbird]

Look! Flowers!


Nordic Yellow

Yep, I'm finally into April. The very beginning of April, but April. ^_^

Thursday's miles: 2.1
Friday's miles: 11.1
Miles out of Hobbiton: 760.6
Miles out of Rivendell: 300.8
Miles to Lothlórien: 165.6

I bought a bike rack yesterday. Yay, I can carry things that don't fit in my backpack now! It carries up to something stupid like 35kg, so I don't think I'll be wanting for weight limit. Size, maybe. but not weight. I also bought a bungee just to have handy. The only bad thing yesterday about biking was stopping to talk to somebody who was wearing a T-shirt of my lameass undergrad school - I was stunned by its presense, it turned out he was just wearing it as a gag and had never been there - when somebody whipped by me and cranked out, "I bet you don't do that in your car!" while racing off. Fuck off, asshat, this isn't a goddamn highway, it's a walking trail! (And no, we weren't blocking the trail. She just apparently didn't like having to, you know, pass me.) ATTENTION ASSHATS: THE BURKE-GILMAN TRAIL IS NOT AN INTERSTATE HIGHWAY. SOMETIMES PEOPLE WILL STOP TO TALK. GET OVER IT.

But despite that it was a good ride. I'm hoping I can get a wide tray or something for the rack so that maybe I could do things like buy plants and bring them home. That'd just be cool.

Paul's camera is a lot better at getting bird photos at the feeder than either of my old digitals:


Hungry Little Bird

The tree behind the feeder is all leafing out now, of course.

Comments

News Rack Destroyed in 'Bomb' Scare

[pstratt.livejournal.com]

MI: 3 starts off auspiciously!

"A newspaper promotion for the upcoming movie "Mission: Impossible III" misfired Friday when a Los Angeles County sheriff's arson squad blew up a news rack, thinking it contained a bomb."

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-racks29apr29,0,349524.story?coll=la-story-footer

Well, that's starkly orthogonal

[solarbird]

Um... hi?

[poodlgrl.livejournal.com]

"I bet you don't do that in your car!" while racing off.

YES well that would be the POINT now wouldnt' it?

[solarbird]

Exactly. YOU WANNA HIGHWAY GET ON THE HIGHWAY. Or, I dunno, Lake City or something.

Oh, I forgot to mention: King County got one of those "The speed limit is X, you are going Y" signs that tracks your speed with RADAR! and set it up on the trail about midway through Lake Forest Park. It made me laff. I was going 12! The speed limit was 15. PHEW I SURE FEEL BETTER!

(Actually, I was pretty pleased that at the 10 mile point my cruising speed was still 12.)

Not to put too fine a point on it, but Lake Forest Park really is becoming the asshat section of that trail. It's in that section that I've run into bike cops hassling bikers, it's that section where the city put STOP!! signs on the trail at almost every point a private driveway crosses the trail (public roads would be one thing, but private drives? Fuck you), the RADAR speed limit sign, and this crap. Kenmore is fine (so far), Bothell is fine (I LOVE FERAL CHICKENS!), Seattle is fine, but Lake Forest Park has this total 'tude going. I don't get it.

[llachglin.livejournal.com]

Lake Forest Park seems to be owned by the cranky waterfront property owners, and they hate the fact that there's a public easement nearby. Bad combination.

[solarbird]

Do they hate it? Honest question. I hadn't seen any sign of that historically.

[stickmaker.livejournal.com]

I've noticed many drivers strongly resist any change of speed or direction, 'cause that, like, requires them to actually _think_ about what they're doing instead of sitting there comfortably zoned out. Anything which makes them wake up (such as needing to react to the car in front of them slowing for a turn) and take an action besides just cruising makes them angry. Usually, they don't even know why they're angry, so they blame the immediate "cause."

Was this rude person actually driving or on foot or bike? (You say this is a trail but also mention driveways, so I'm thinking something like a two-lane road where all three methods of transportation occur.)

[solarbird]

She was on bike, I was on bike, the other people were on foot; it wasn't anywhere near a driveway, so there was no opportunity for vehicle traffic.

The Burke-Gilman trail is part of an extensive series of biking/walking trails in the Seattle metro area, most of which are former railroad right-of-ways abandoned by the railway owners and bought by local (mostly King County and Seattle) governments. The system is still being built out; there's a Spring 2007 project that will complete the linkage all the way from downtown Redmond through Kirkland, Woodinville, Bothell, Kenmore (where we live now), Lake Forest Park and all the way down to downtown Seattle, via the B-G and Sammamish River trails.

King County has a pretty good comprehensive map. This map shows Seattle's planned system and is actually out of date; most if not all of the yellow portions are now completed, so should be blue, and work has been started on some of the red portions. (In fact, I thought the Burke-Gilman red section was also finished. They just had a big party celebrating completion of the Burke-Gilman "missing link" a few months ago.)

Here's another view of the King County portion of the system. Once the parts that are missing are completed, you'd be able to bike or hike on bike-and-walking-only trails from Shoreline and Kenmore (north border, King County) all the way south to Federal Way on the southern border of the county, and west from the Sound to all the major towns on the east side - and then go on foot into the mountains. (And I guess you could bike those too, but I'm not up for steep gravel-trail biking. ^_^ ) The King County map doesn't even show the new East Lake Sammamish trail, or the new planned eastside connector, which, if it goes through, will meet the Sammamish River/Burke Gilman trail area in Woodinville and go all the way down the east side of Lake Washington and down to Renton. We'd be able to bike to Kirby's house, and to Fry's Electronics, were we so insane. (It's a solid 30 miles each way. ^_^ )

[llachglin.livejournal.com]

I go pretty fast on the trail and sometimes pedestrians can be an annoyance because I can't maintain my pace, but I realize it's a multi-use trail. There's no reason not to be polite, and if cyclists want to go fast, there are several roads that can be used instead where they'll be the slow ones, but at least able to maintain their pace. People need to get over themselves.