~~~
Day’s Verse:
Praise the LORD, O my soul.
O LORD my God, you are very great;
you are clothed with splendor and majesty.
…He set the earth on its foundations;
it can never be moved.
You covered it with the deep as with a garment;
the waters stood above the mountains.
But at your rebuke the waters fled,
at the sound of your thunder they took to flight;
they flowed over the mountains,
they went down into the valleys,
to the place you assigned for them.
Psalm 104:1-8
~~~
Please help me raise money for the MS Bike Tour Cape Cod Getaway. Donate today on my MS Participant page.
~~~

After my last brain-intensive post, I’m taking a break and presenting you with pictures from last week’s long bike rides.

SATURDAY, June 13

Start: Met a couple of other riders at Clay Pit Hill School, which also saw action as a baseball and soccer practice venue for parents driving huge SUVs full of sports equipment.

Our second stop (after the bathrooms in Concord) was the Great Brook Hill Farm, a nice park in the Carlisle area.

Then we rode for a while and eventually got to a nice shady green common in Littleton, where we fortuitously arrived just as a huge group of people skied by. Yes, skied — apparently in the summer skiers keep in shape skiing shape by getting wheeled skis. The people in this picture are actually just the front of a much larger crowd of wheel-skiers. I admit I found this endlessly fascinating, probably more than I should have, but I had never heard of or seen such a thing before.

Eventually we got back to the elementary school, where a crowd of soccer moms and dads had replaced the baseball practice people. A soccer game was in progress, so I got to practice taking pictures of moving targets until Ian arrived to take me home.

SUNDAY, June 14

I took about 10,000 pictures in an attempt to combine some into a high dynamic range image. None of them turned out right for combining into an HDR picture because I had no tripod, and the pictures have to be exactly the same, which is virtually impossible holding the camera still by hand. I’m not going to say too much about these; you can see location details by clicking on the pictures. They are in order of the route.

Holden Reservoir:

I almost had to use the bushes while taking the pictures at the Holden Reservoir, so in desperation I stopped the first open business I found:

They let me use their employee bathroom. I could have wept with relief. Buy their pizza!

Kettlebrook Reservoir:

A sign I saw near a golf course in Leicester made me do a double-take:

There is something so odd about being urged to share the road with other motorized vehicles.

Not long after that I reached the Buffumville Reservoir, which name makes me snicker every time I see, think, or say it. It was very pretty, though.

The Buffumville Reservoir also yielded the only HDR-worthy collection of images, which eventually produced my first-ever HDR attempt:

And last, but not least, the Pratt Pond in Upton, MA:

I also took a picture of every cemetery I went by on that 69-mile ride. I always know I’m still in New England when I go by a cemetery, which happens remarkably often. I always wondered how often, and now I
have one data point: 69 miles; 8 cemeteries. Here are the pictures if you want to see them.