Summer Weather

I haven't posted in a few weeks because I didn't have anything interesting to post. The weather has swung between nice to ridiculously humid to raging thunderstorms. The last Thursday in August I took a day off and went to the Philadelphia Zoo as I had wanted to see it and try to get some good pictures of some of the animals there. You can see all my pictures here. Unfortunately the Wings of Asia exhibit was closed as they were introducing some new birds which is too bad as it is one of the reasons I went there. However in the normal aviary I found a cool bird that is actually a pigeon. 

 

I think if most pigeons looked like this nobody would mind them that much.  

While most of my friends were doing the Sourlands Spectacular last Saturday I just did a local ride on my own. It was misting in the morning before I started the ride and was still unbelievably humid during the ride. I'm usually not too bothered by the heat or humidity but I'm pretty sure that more water was dripping off my body than I could drink so I actually cut the ride short. 

We haven't had as many heat waves this year as usual so although this was the hottest summer for the world and a lot of other places that was not the case here. We have had fewer days above 90 than normal but it has definitely been one of the more humid summers. We also had some pretty good storms. We had a couple lighting storms parked over us where I could see the lighting hitting trees and the golf course around us. I suspect it might be the reason I had to replace a garage door opener last weekend.

The storms also made me cancel my planned trip to Gettysburg but I did take a day off this week to do a ride in the Sourlands by myself since the weather was perfect for a ride. It was cool with no humidity and the sky was dotted with clouds as shown in the picture at the top of this post. 

This past weekend hurricane Lee was off shore. It stayed far enough off shore so we didn't get any rain but it did send some high waves and rough surf towards our beaches. 

We went down to Avon for dinner on Friday night and stopped by the beach to look at the waves. They were 10-12 feet and breaking over the jetties. The waves were so big that they actually broke over both sides of the shark river inlet as they rolled in. 

However by Saturday afternoon when I was at Sandy Hook on my ride the waves were probably only half the size and the winds not as bad as expected. It was suppose to be mostly cloudy with 15-20 mph winds but the weather at Sandy Hook was only partly cloudy and the winds weren't that bad probably around 10-12. There were a lot of wind and kite surfers at Sandy Hook taking advantage of the wind and we saw a few surfers riding the wave. But when we headed west the go back home the headwind wasn't as bad as expected. In fact it ended up being a good day for a ride. 

Fall starts this Saturday which means summer is over but there should be a lot of good riding weather ahead.