Winter Biking

It seems like since I got back from Iceland it has gotten a lot colder here and in fact this weekend felt a lot like the middle of winter. I did lead a 40+ mile ride on the road last Sunday out of MCP but the reason I rode on Sunday instead of Saturday was because it was below freezing last Saturday. We did this route which is a modified New Egypt run to be able to stop at one or our favorite coffee shops down that way. It felt good to get out on the road again after 2+ weeks off the bike but I was dragging a bit at the end.

This week neither Saturday or Sunday was really going to be warm enough to be on the road although I know some people will be doing the Cranksgiving ride on Sunday. This Saturday I switched to the mountain bike and lead a ride up the canal to from Washington Crossing to Bulls Island and back. We went up the PA side to avoid a strong north headwind because the PA side has more cover. It didn't really matter though because when we went down the NJ side there wasn't much of a tail wind and in fact we had a strong head wind at times.

This is the earliest that I have had the mountain bike out as is usually doesn't get cold enough to have to go onto the trail until beginning of December. Let's hope this cold snap is temporary and not a sign of a cold winter. This mountain bike ride is the first time I rode the new mountain bike in the cold as I got it in the early spring. Since I did the GAP trail and other trail rides in the summer it felt a little strange to ride it in the cold.

In some non biking new I took Monday off the see the transit of Mercury across the Sun. I managed to get a couple of good pictures using my Canon SX740 mounted to my telescope. The 40x zoom is good enough to get a reasonable picture of the Sun through a solar filter.

I also got to see a good sunrise as the transit started about 30 mins after the sun rose.

In one last piece of news from Iceland I found a web cam that looks over the harbor at Reykjavik at the Imagine Peace Light. You can look at the live stream to see what an aurora looks like in real time. They also archive the live stream so you can look through previous nights instead of having to watch it live. If you want to see what an aurora looks like in real time click on this link and scroll ahead to 1:55 or 3:35 and watch it for 10 mins and you will see what it really looks like as opposed to pictures of it. The web cam is not the best quality so you don't see the purple and yellow spikes rolling through the aurora but is still pretty interesting to watch and cheaper than a trip to Iceland.