I didn’t ride too far today. I was exploring routes in my area, in part because storms were too close again, and I didn’t want to get too far from home. This image shows us under the edge of a storm cell at dawn.
Later, when I had made my way to the Regional Parks system, I caught the last wisps of morning mist above Soldier Creek (below). This is Pecan Grove Park. It had rained a little overnight, just enough to recharge the run-off in the creek a little, but not enough to cool the stream much. It was a sweaty morning.
Midwest City has been replacing a lot of sidewalks along Reno Avenue. The sidewalks turn into a bikeway (“multi-use path”) in the park (below), so it’s just the same work the crews have been doing for months, just a wider and more curvy path. It’s not a wholesale replacement; this section had a lot of tree-root humps that were breaking up the pavement.
As it turned out, the storms missed us. This is looking across Barnes Park to the west. The winds at surface level are from the south (our left) but the winds aloft are from the north. It’s because of a massive heat dome over the southwestern states and those spin clockwise. Thus, the storms moved from north to south, exiting to the left, and missing us by just a dozen miles or so. I could have easily ridden into the storms this morning.
At one point my route brought me within just a few miles of the storm cell (right). There was a wide spot that projected very close to us as it passed (right to left in this image). The darker the clouds, the higher the storm tops, and the more intense that action.
But when you see this sort of fleecy stuff overhead (below), you are safe. The storms aren’t even thinking about coming for hours, if at all. This is just across the street from where I live.
Don’t know why it annoys me so much, but I dislike it when I see grass or weeds growing up from the pavement in a line…even more than if it were scattered.
It’s part of what we live with in Oklahoma. The paradigm is all wrong for our climate. The only way to reduce the appearance of such things with that style of pavement is annual maintenance that closes those gaps with a hardened filler, and there is simply way too much pavement for that level of maintenance.