Tuesday, March 25, 2008
When I drove back to Albany it was sunny and warm - perfect weather for getting in a ride after I got home. Unfortunately, by the time I got everything together and made it out to the bike path, it was cloudy and chilly. Oh, well.
As I rode east from the Niskayuna Lions Park I was feeling pretty good (besides a mild sinus headache and needing to suck on a cough drop - bleah.) I haven't been on a real ride on one of my road bikes since December (not that I got out on my ATB much either this winter, since the snowshoe duathlon was cancelled and I was a lazy bum) so it was nice to be humming along the path. I hit an occasional gust of headwind which had me thinking that the ride back would be a little easier, with those at my back (that was a dumb thought, as I'll explain in a bit.) And I reached the point at which I'd planned to turn around (the top of the steep hill down to the short stretch of road to get around the Northway) right at 20 minutes, which was the time I'd given myself before I needed to head back.
Once I turned around and started back toward the park, I remembered an important bit of info - the wind almost always blows west to east along the bike path. In other words, I had a cold headwind all the way back to the park. You'd think with all the times I've ridden and run on that path I'd have remembered that right from the start. Needless to say, the ride back was tougher than the ride out, and by the time I got back to the parking lot I was sufficiently cold and my legs were sufficiently tired (despite only riding 8 miles!) that I was glad I needed to get over to the karate school and didn't have more time.
While I was riding I saw the ever-present ducks and geese, and also spotted a muskrat swimming along the edge of the river. When I got back I saw some birds swimming in the river, so after I packed up the bike I grabbed my binoculars and took a look. Initially I thought they were just mallards, though something didn't look quite right about them - the thing that stood out the most was a white stripe on their bills, and I couldn't remember seeing anything like that before. When I got home I checked my bird guide, and I'm now pretty sure they were ring-necked ducks. (I know the photo below doesn't look much like a mallard, other than that both are ducks. But it was nearing dusk on a cloudy evening... maybe I'll pick up another field guide and leave it in the car with the binoculars!)
photo ©2007 Walter Siegmund, courtesy of Wikipedia Commons
JMH
