My new Morning Commute!

 

This is my first attempt at sharing my morning commute with you -- it's a pretty big file, and when I turn the camera sideways, the wind noise kind of takes over . . . but I thought you'd like to see it anyhow! Download the movie! 

A Kira-sized tomato?!?

My very first tomato this year -- and it's one that's so tiny even Megan might not notice she was eating it!
 
It was, however, quite tasty in a very small sort of way, like the hiccup of a gnat! 

Off-road commuting to work, part 2

Now that I knew where my building is along the path, I could try finding an alternate route . . . and just a few hundred yards later, I found this private road, which is used by the local fire departments to access their training grounds!

I was sure they wouldn't mind me using it, so I wandered up to see how close I could get to the building . . . and as it turns out, aside from a small and easily-crossed drainage ditch filled with cattails, I was right next to the field outside our building! Someone else uses this already, with a distinct path already created -- so my commute can now be entirely off-road, and quite beautiful to boot.

Then there's the I-390 bridge over the Genesee & Erie Canal, as seen from our canoe in a previous posting, and then the Genesee & Wyoming railroad yard that lies a little ways behind our house.

 
 
 
  

Off-road commuting to work, part 1

It's a short and easy ride down Chili Ave to the Erie Canal Trail, and from there just a few minutes to the Genesee Greenway Trail, which runs a few dozen yards behind my new office.

However, those "few dozen yards" are a pretty healthy forest, so it's not very easy to find my building, and, it turns out, quite hard to actually get to it! I've ended up just taking the Scottsville Road off-ramp from the canal trail, and suffering through a few minutes of struggling against traffic. No fun, for sure, and not very safe, either.

So I went a mile or so further south along Scottsville Road to the Jet Diner parking lot, where the trail abruptly terminates (perhaps a lack of money to continue?), then rode north, hoping to locate an easy crossover nearer to my office; here are some pictures from the journey:
 

The RG&E training facility was a surprise -- my favorite bit is the little tiny "electric poles", with their transformers at a convenient working level for easy training without needing to climb.
 
 

And then there's the Northwest Passage . . . an 8' drainage ditch that got me started thinking of building a bridge -- chop down a few trees, drop 'em across the ditch . . . probably not a good idea, but what else could I do?

 

Happy Birthday, Dave!

 
While back in Springfield, we went out to dinner at Mi Jalapeno, a reasonably-authentic Mexican restaurant up by Upper Valley Mall -- a dichotomy I enjoy, actually.
 
 


In the women's restroom at the Marathon gas station just outside Hustead, Dar found this great schedule of how people *used* to make that trip . . . .