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Today it was more about getting the exercise, so it’s a cycling post with a few pictures. Because I still can’t really go all that far, I’m trying to find some back roads I hadn’t seen before. I went north on Air Depot to NE 10th, west to Sooner Road, north to NE 23rd and then west again to Bartell Road.
I was hoping, but while it was pleasant enough, there was nothing picturesque there. It ended at NE 50th, and I took a short zigzag up to Krause Road where I saw a couple of interesting scenes.
There was supposed to be a nifty Buddhist garden up there, but at some time in the recent past it was fenced off and made private. I thought it odd that a junk yard was next door to the garden.
Back out on NE 50th, I headed west toward the museums and the Katy Trail. This was to make sure I hit some good, solid climbs. Of course, I had to shift down pretty low, but I wanted the right knee to get all the work it could stand. Climbing up the Firefighter Museum, today I decided to stop and take some pictures from the foot of that strange statue that stands out on the end of a ridge.
Maneuvering around the walls of honor, in one direction was this view across a steep draw at the Lincoln Golf Course (left). On the other side was a nice shot of the lake adjacent to the big zoo (right). That also puts them in proper arrangement with where I saw them from the memorial.
Heading south, the golf course was very busy this morning.
There was and a rather long line of golf carts waiting at the first tee, and people lined up on each successive tee waiting for some previous party to clear. To slow things even more, the groundskeepers were all over the place. Farther south past the OK National Guard HQ and the OKC Public Schools storage depot was this lovely cane brake across the trail.
I heard numerous whispering voices as I rode through, so I turned to take a picture. Just a short distance farther began the heavy sweet scent of these lovely white flowering vines. For something like 3 miles these things were everywhere on both sides, thickly covering whatever grew or stood there along the path.
Despite the awful racket from the interstate highway below, I paused briefly where NE 4th crosses over. Farther along I spotted a couple of scruffy fellows trudging along the sandy trails the parallel the river banks. They were carrying a couple of loaded t-shirt bags that appeared to be from the Metro Petro down on ML King near Reno Avenue. An awful lot of beggars stand near the interstate highway ramps there or somewhere close to the intersections of the surface streets. The North Canadian flow had receded again to expose a lot of newly positioned sandbars, as this view from the bridge on NE 4th shows. By the time I got home, I was whipped. It was a good workout, 15 miles with some long and steep hills.
