Friday, August 27, 2010

Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Bike Trip

I was away for the last four days on a bike trip to Allegany State Park, my friend Ben's Family has a cabin just outside of the park in Pennsylvania. It is an 80 mile ride from Buffalo, the second half of which is very hilly. We rode down on Friday in perfect sunny weather and then it proceeded to rain for three straight days. On the ride back we got rained on hard for a couple of hours and never fully dried out. I shot a lot of macro stuff with an off camera flash while I was there.







A Red Eft soon to transform into an Eastern Newt

A different Red Eft

Ben's family's cabin

Ben, on the Pat McGee Trail, 12 miles of converted railway bed

Me, after a long climb through the rain

My bike, a 2009 Raleigh Sojourn, a very heavy, very rugged touring bike. Unfortunately, the leather Brooks saddle that the bike came with doesn't work for me so I've had to make the aesthetic sacrifice of going with an ugly seat. I have, however, added long metal touring fenders which are a big improvement over the plastic one the bike shipped with. Although I have already put 1200 miles on the bike since April, this was my first chance to try it out with loaded panniers (about 25 lbs.) it handled really well in a variety of conditions, dirt trails, rough gravel roads, etc.

Saturday, August 14, 2010

Wednesday, August 4, 2010

Daily Book Graphics #500 / Religions

©1973 / Nicholas Krenitsky / another Krenitsky here. / Well here it is, post #500 in the Daily Book Graphics project. I'm sitting here with a huge stack of books behind me so I'm not planning on stopping any time soon.