FUCK 2020!!!

 

 Nobody is going to have fond memories of 2020. It was a horrible year for a number of reasons. The main reason of course was the pandemic. Although we knew about Covid-19 last January nobody really understood how bad it was until March when the case and death count rose dramatically and it was officially declared a pandemic. As of today John Hopkins website shows that over 1.8 million people have died world wide with over 342,000 in the US alone. That is a lot of tragic stories of fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters and friends dying an untimely death. And unfortunately it is not over as the case and hospitalizations are at an all time high and we are setting new records almost daily.

There is some good news as there are now a couple of vaccines available that should help stop the pandemic but it may be a few months before enough people are vaccinated to see a drop in cases and deaths. This means the first few months of 2021 are going to be a continuation of 2020 but at least there is hope that 2021 will be a year of improvement and healing. 

The pandemic was not the only thing that made 2020 a bad year. There were months of civil unrest because of the inequality in our country as highlighted by the death of George Floyd, Breonna Talyor and too many others. On top of that there were horrible wild fires in the west that burned millions of acres and thousands of home. There was a record number of hurricanes this year. Its like nature is angry at us. And there were of course Murder Hornets invading the US. 

On a personal note I lost my mother in January which was a sad start to the year. As the pandemic set it I was anxious of course but I was already working remote so it wasn't as big a change for me as for other people. My wife and I have taken a very cautious approach to the pandemic and have limited our contact to a very small circle of friends and family and this has kept us safe and disease free but has meant no vacations or family gatherings (Although to be honest I don't miss certain members of my family that much). 

I do know a few friends who got Covid but luckily none has had a bad case so I have yet to be directly impacted in any big way by the pandemic. My heart does go out the people who lost loved ones and are struggling because or lost wages or jobs. I know things will get better soon but it is a very painful time for a lot of people that is going to leave scars that we will all need to help heal (especially the nurses and doctors that are on the front lines of this). 

I am thankful during this year that I had the insane bike posse as it helped keep me sane. It was just good to get out and do something almost normal. In the beginning of the pandemic we stopped riding together but as we got more information about the virus and how it spread we found ways to safely ride together like most other bike groups. 

Because of the pandemic we didn't do any bike trips this year but we did go to a few places in NJ that we haven't been in a while and is something we will continue next year. We also got together on Zoom meetings like most other people. Initially it was to check in with each other and talk about the pandemic and how to safely ride together. We kept it going most of the year to keep some type of social interaction going. This year has been the most fucked up year of my life but I'm glad I had my bike and a few friends to make this year a little more bearable.

 

O Holy Night

With Christmas comes the story of the birth of Jesus. According to the story there was a bright star that guided the Magi to the manger where Jesus was born. Astronomers have asked themselves if there was some celestial event that would explain this bright star. There were some planetary conjunctions and some reports of comets within a few year of when Jesus was suppose to be born. One of these conjunctions was the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn which also appeared this year around Christmas. 

I have been watching the sky for the past couple of weeks and got a few good pictures just after sunset from my house. 

The one about was taken on Dec 17th. You can see the Moon on the top left and Jupiter and Saturn just above the trees on the right. Jupiter is the brighter one. I watched Jupiter and Saturn get a little close each day. Here is picture I grabbed from https://spaceweathergallery.com/ showing Jupiter and Saturn getting closer. Click on it to zoom in.

The actual conjunction was on Dec 21 where the planets would be within 0.10 degrees of each other. The planets haven't bee this close in 800 years. Unfortunately on Dec 21 it was just too cloudy to get a shot but here is another one from https://spaceweathergallery.com/ show what it looked like. 

You can see Jupiter and Saturn in the top middle of the photo. The inset on the top left shows you a close up where you can see the rings of Saturn and the moons of Jupiter. 

I did get a few picture on Dec 22 where Jupiter and Saturn were almost as close. Saturn is now to the right and below Jupiter. The wide angle shot is at the top of this post. There were clouds around so there only a few opens to get the some pictures. 

I did get a good close up of the conjunction on Dec 22. Saturn looks a little elongated because of the rings and the glare around Jupiter is actually the moons. This is a pretty good picture from a point and shoot camera.

I also got an couple of shots on Dec 23 from my house. 

I'm not sure why these type of planetary conjunctions generate so much interest as they are just two points of lights converging in the sky. But these conjunctions have interested people for thousands of years and is one of the reasons the field of astronomy exists. Originally these conjunctions were thought predict some important event and if that is the case lets hope this conjunction means better things for next year.

Snow Day

 

The weather for December has been a mixed bag. It started off with a cold weekend that was too cold to do a road ride so we ended up on the LHT trail. The LHT trail is continually being improved so its always nice to take a ride and see if anything has changed. The main change they made recently was around Rosedale park where they added a couple of bridges to get rid of some messy and dangerous parts of the trail. 

Last weekend I ended up two road rides on my own as the weather was warmed up and almost hit 60 on my Sunday ride. 

This week we got 4-6 inches of snow and after the storm it stay cold so none of us wanted to get out on the road. Laura suggested Tyler State Park and we all agreed. Tyler State Park has a series of paved paths that they keep plowed in the winter so its one of the few places that you can ride after a snow storm safely. 

It was 24 degrees when we all got there at 10am. I had my warmest gear on and once we got started it was warm enough. I have a nine mile loop around the park that we usually do twice. However once we crossed the dam over the Neshaminy Creek and headed up the hill we found that not all of the paths were plowed. We usually go down to the covered bridge but that path was still snow covered with just a couple of ruts in it from a truck that went down it. I went about a quarter mile down the snow to see if it was possible to get the bridge but turn around as it would have been an ice mess trying to get back up the hill. 

Usually we take a path that dumps us into a neighborhood and then take a path back into the park. However the path back into park wasn't plowed either so  we ended up taking side streets through the neighborhoods and a golf course to get back to a paved park path. 

While going through the neighborhoods we hear a lot of loud sirens. It sounded as it was a mass causality event but it ended up just being the local firehouse Santa parade. 

We eventually made our way back into the park paths but had to make one last detour on the local roads to get back to the start. We only have about 10 miles in so we did another small loop around the park this time keeping to the paths we knew were open. We ended up with close 14 miles and 800ft of climbing so it was a good work out. The weather looks cold for the rest of the year but I'm sure we will get a few more rides in before the new year.

Sunny November Rides

 

Although the weather has gotten colder as we get closer to winter there have been some sunny days that have allowed me to get some long rides in. At this time of year nobody wants to drive to far from home so all the rides have been local within about 10 miles of my house. In the last few Saturdays we have done rides in the 50 mile range and not too hilly. A few weeks ago we did my Jackson Wawa run and this week on a Friday ride we headed to Farmingdale. A couple of weeks ago we crossed over Rt1 on one of my stupider routes. 

Because of the pandemic it is easier to get across Rt1 so I have done that more often this year. Even through I have ridden these roads many times there are still things to discover. I tried to use a few interesting bike paths to do something different. We started off on the Trolley Line trail in West Windsor and then headed through Plainsboro to get to Rt1 and crossed at New Rd. On the way back we headed back across Rt1 at Harrison and through the old Sarnoff labs. 

There are a lot of cool little paths in NJ and there are more every year. One of my favorites it the LHT which is constantly being improved. I was off the day before Thanksgiving and did a 30 mile trail ride down to Trenton through Pennington and back along the LHT. It was a long ride for a mountain bike ride but I was trying to burn some extra calories before Thanksgiving although this years celebration involved much less food and people than normal.

I know that there will be some tough cold months ahead where it will be harder to ride for a couple of different reasons. However I know there there will always be a few sunny days that will allow me to keep riding until and getting together with the posse that will get me through the winter.

A Couple of Silly Rides

 

As this has been a stressful year for a lot of reasons I have tried to increase my silliness a little. So when Laura had a ride last Saturday on Halloween I decided to add a spiderweb to my helmet. It wasn't much of a costume but is was more than I usually do as I'm not a big fan of Halloween. 

 It was barely above freezing when we started the ride but it was sunny and once we got moving I was warm enough. We headed to Lambertville to see the Halloween displays but this year there weren't a lot of big displays so it was kind of disappointing.

This week I decided to do something flatter. The weather was much warmer and was close to 60 when we started so all I needed was a long sleeve jersey. We started in Bordentown and I invited Chris to join us since he lives so close. Chis always seems to have a small malfunction every time he joins us. This time he had a problem keeping his head, I mean helmet on so it took him a few minutes to fix it. 

Since it was a sunny fall day I decided to head to Robling for to get a view of the river. We ended up going down almost to the Burlington Bristol bridge. 

 

It doesn't smell real nice in this area kind of a mix of raw garbage, industrial waste with a hint of diesel fumes. We did see a few interesting things along the river. We saw an outside spin class. Not sure how they got all those spin bikes in the middle of the park but somebody got a work out putting them there. We also saw a couple of parks and marinas and this Eagle statue. 

Since Laura decided to be in the glass studio instead of joining us I sent the required middle finger pictures. It just a stupid thing we do. It wasn't one of my more created pictures. I originally planned to do it in front of a Trump sign but we couldn't find many of them for some reason...

After a few pictures by the bridge we headed out of town to the better roads in Jacksonville and Columbus on our way back to Bordentown. It felt good to run these roads on a warm sunny day after last weeks cold ride. I know that winter is coming so it was good to get one more warm ride in before that happens.

Falling Leaves

 

This week I continued with my mini bike vacations. This Friday I took the day off and decided the check out the Paulinskill Trail which is near Blairstown NJ. This is a 27 mile long rail trail along the Paulins kill (kill is Dutch for creek). I had not done this trail before but my nephew had hiked it a few weeks ago and it looked interesting.

It was another hour and a half drive to the start. It was cloudy with a little fog along the way but when I got to the starting point it was just cloudy and the fog had retreated to the surrounding mountains. It is just after peak foliage so there were good color in the trees even thought a lot of leaves are already down. 

 I got Jack, Pete, Ricky and Laura to join me. The trail map said there was a parking lot at the beginning of the trail but we couldn't find it so parked at a ball field about a mile away. 

The start of the trail was a little rough and rocky with a little mud and Laura took a spill on one of the muddy parts but we kept going and after a mile or so it got better especially after we passed the Paulinskill viaduct.

I couldn't really tell what the surface was as it was covered with a few inches of leaves. The trail is mostly through the woods along the creek but there were a couple of spots where we got a view of the mountains and some fall colors

The trail goes next to the Blairtown airport and through the backside of Blairstown. At the north end of town there is a dam and a scenic lake where we stopped to take a few pics

 

 

There were also a few interesting bridges along the way.

At just over 12 miles out Laura and I decided to turn back as I wanted to get back to go visit my father. Ricky, Jack and Pete continued to head up the trail for about 10 miles.

On the way back Laura and I stopped a few times for some more pictures. I tried to get some good pictures of the Paulinskill viaduct but it was really hard to get a picture through the trees.

Its an impressive structure architecturally and has some interesting features as profiled in Weird NJ. The main feature is that the bridge has internal tunnels use to inspect the bridge. The bridge was build in 1908 for a rail line that ran between Scranton PA and New York. The rail line went out of service in 1979 so the bridge is abandon and its out side and internal tunnels are covered with graffiti some of it satanic in nature. Since the bridge was abandon it has been a popular place for teens to hang out and party so the state police patrol this area often. 

This trail is a little rougher than the Columbia trail or the D&R Canal trail but it was a very scenic trail so it was a good way to spend a day off.

 

Zoo Cruise

 

We haven't been able to do any bike vacations this year so instead we have done some local rides to parts of the state we haven't been too in a while. This Saturday we headed down to Bridgeton which is in the deep southern part of the state. There are a lot of quiet flat roads in this area in and among the farmland that makes New Jersey the Garden State. Down in this area here is also the Cohanzick Zoo. Its a very small zoo and will take you all of 10mins to walk through but its worth the diversion if you are in the area and gave us another reason to take the hour and 20 min ride to get to there especially since we all got nothing but time. I got most of the crew to join me included Laura, Jim, Pete, Jack and Ricky.

Bridgeton was one area covered in my Road Biking NJ book and I called the ride around the Bridgeton area the Zoo Cruise because as part of the ride it visits the zoo. We also stopped here in 2015 as part of our high point rides. The ride we did today was sort of a combination of the two with a few new roads thrown in. This is a very rural area filled with farmland, small lakes and a few grouping of buildings that they call towns. 

We started the ride going into a stiff north west wind which made the hill we were climbing seem worst than it really was. We passed by Rainbow lake and Parvin lake on our way to the high point of Cumberland country which at 140 feet is hard to even find. From there we wound our way through a lot of open farmland to Alloway where we stopped at a general store. The southern part of the state is a lot redder than other parts of the state and the sign on the door of the store made it clear that the owner didn't agree with Govern Murphy's mask mandate. 

We continued on some more quiet roads and eventually got a good tail wind as we headed south along some rivers and swamp land not far from the Delaware river. We did have a few small hills to climb towards the end which felt harder than they should of but then we got another good tail wind to push us back to where we started. 

After the ride we took a walk around the zoo. They have some small marsupials and lemma but the main attraction is the lion and the tiger and the bear. I had bought a new gaiter for Halloween. I like the SweatVac Shapshifers as they have two layers and are a simple mask I can easily pull up when needed when I ride. They also have some cool patterns. I got the tiger one because that is my favorite animals. I know gaiters are not the best mask so when I know that I'm going to be closer to people I put a surgical mask underneath it. 

Of course with a tiger mask on I had to try and get a selfie with the actual tiger.

I took one with my phone which came out okay but Ricky took the one at the top of the blog which is a better close up. Here is a better picture of the actual tiger.

I didn't get a good picture of the bear as he was laying in his hammock and was just a ball of fur.  

Last time I was at the zoo I got a good picture of the people riding we me in front of the (plastic) Gorilla. I was going to try and do a similar shot this time but with the Gorilla roped off and social distant requirements we took a slightly different type of picture. 

 

For some reason giving the finger while taking a group picture has become our standard. This time Laura got to partake instead of being the recipient of the picture. I guess this is our FUCK 2020 picture.

Although it was a long day it ended up being a fun day and so we may do a few more of these type of excursions as a way to get some mini bike vacations in.