I thought maybe I’d show you the places where I bike, because there’s something awesome about being able to turn off on a little path you never saw before and discover a lake. Or a tiny wooden bridge over a dry creek bed. Or right alongside the road, a little green frog the size of a quarter.
This is Angelborough’s Main Street:
In all its Angelborough, swampy glory. If you look real hard, you can even see the McDonalds. (Or maybe I’m joking. You decide.)
While I stopped to take another picture, I found a tiny rock wall buried in the bushes off to the side of the road:
And to prove I’m a criminal, even after I saw this sign, I took the shot:
But what I really wanted to show you was this, and unfortunately there isn’t a camera in the world that can really capture what I want you to see. But imagine you’re on this curvy road, kind of like this,
and then you turn the corner, and you’re surrounded by green on all sides, and on both sides of the road you’ve got these tall maples — thirty, forty feet high — and their branches meet overhead like the ceiling of a cathedral.
I can’t give you the surrounding with my camera. I can give you a shot kind of down the center of the road (although I didn’t, because I didn’t want to become roadkill) but it’s not the same. It’s enough to see why I love to bike here, though. Why it’s worth biking five miles just to be here:
Welcome to Angelborough, Swampland and home of the angels and the mountain bikes.
Gorgeous, Jane. Simply gorgeous. Thank you for sharing your bike path.
It’s beautiful. It’s also very like a road near my home where I hate to find bikers – because they are usually *in* the road, there being no shoulder, and they appear very suddenly coming around a bend.
So be careful, Jane. Let’s keep your angel busy for a few more years.
There’s a route I like but I won’t ride any longer after I drove it in a car. The road is very twisty, maybe fifteen feet wide, and no shoulders whatsoever. There’s the white line and then the pavement ends in a ditch. Meanwhile it’s hilly so you’re flying down these curves… Not so much anymore.
Yesterday I simply got off the road when there was a jogger coming toward me on the shoulder, a DPW truck behind me and another car approaching on the other side. Any one of them I’d have stayed on the road, but all three? No. There was poision ivy on the side of the road, but I figured if I pulled off I could at least stand on it, whereas if the truck sent me flying, I’d land in it anyhow. 🙂
So yeah, I do try to be careful.
Gorgeous.
These pix are all very green. Have you tinkered with the colour? I’m more used to olive green with ochre tones and smooth white bark. Makes a nice background when the wattle comes out.
A colleagure from Hong Kong recently asked me, “Why do Australians go bushwalking?” Not like, just go. She and her family are still coming to terms with the idea of moveable furniture. Everything they used to have was custom-built to fit into a small space. Their new Australian house is only filled with furniture to half way. They had rooms they did not know what to do with, but still had their desks in their bedrooms.
Sometimes we don’t realise how much space we have to play in.
Let’s sing together: “Don’t fence me in . . .”
I didn’t touch the colour, no. This is how it came out of my camera, only smaller, but I thnk it’s pretty accurate.
One of the things I’ve noticed in my “vast” travels **cough** is that many places do have their own shades of green, and it’s a little jarring, but very pretty once you get used to the different locales.
I can see how it would be a jolt for your colleague to go from a compact, tightly-filled house to one with a lot of space. If I moved into a school gymnasium, I’d feel like the last pill rattling around the bottom of a bottle. 🙂