This is a season of change. The heavy flooding is done in our area; we should start drying out here in Central Oklahoma. For several weeks I haven’t ridden much at all, just a few miles to the park and back so I could work out on the equipment there. A couple of days ago my bike told me it was time to put the knobbies back on. My heart is where I heard it, so my brain took a while to process. I know some of the why.
It’s time to get off the roads and start riding just for fun. It will be trails, sidewalks (where safe), and back streets, and I need to be ready to stop for diversions. I should stop pretending I have somewhere I need to go when I’m riding. The knobbies will slow me down just a bit and help me be ready for side trips across most surfaces. Oh, and all through today’s ride, the brakes kept slipping because it’s time to replace the pads.
And then I sensed it was time to swap back to a smart phone. I had been using my wife’s cast-off Essential phone as a tablet, and decided to activate it again for my number. Texting had become such a chore in the flip phone, and the camera was abysmal. These pictures were taken with the “new” phone. I figured that I’d see some damage to the bikeway today. The second shot above was from heavy equipment, operated by the bumbling construction crewmen they hired, which crew has accomplished not very much in the past two years.
This shot shows flood damage from the recent heavy rains. The water washed out the underside of the bikeway. I knew this was going to happen, and this is just the start. The folks who engineered this thing never heard of hydrology, it seems.
That last, unfinished creek bridge on the southern end below the dam is still getting very little attention from the crews. On the other hand, I did see where a little more of the initial layer of asphalt had been laid up on the northwest corner of the lake. I’ll get a picture of that next time I go out there.
So the mulberries are pretty much finished and the dewberries are coming due in the next week or two. Blackberries have another month yet. Right now the mimosa trees are in full bloom with their sickly sweet fragrance everywhere. Those things grow like weeds all over this part of the country. Yep, it’s a season of change.
