1st Bike Ride of The Year!

Finally! We got a "good" Saturday to go for a bike ride! Not chilly, not rainy, not quarantined, not terrified-of-social-distancing (as much). Just a nice sunny warm day. Our area is refreshingly packed with people walking around, usually. And even now it's very common to see a bunch of people strolling around... in masks. But the paths we go on bike rides are relatively clear of that kind of traffic. We brought along a mask, just in case, but never had to put it on.

Woah, does my friend even remember how to ride a bike? It's been so long! Oh, yeah. I guess it's just like... riding... a... bike? Haha. Got ya. Of course we were excited to be going on an adventure to take pictures for sharing.

Here's the infamous trail entrance to the trail we've never been down. It's odd that we've never been down there but somehow this trail entrance is a memorable part of the trip.

Hmmm... This is new. This was the abandoned Bristol Meyer Squibb giant office complex. Looks like some new people moved in and updated the street sign. Innovation Park sounds cool, do they have any rides?

The purple flowers around the entrance seemed shiny and new. How long have they been here?

These buildings always gave off the feeling of an Apocalypse Fortress or like, a semi-hidden Evil Supervillain Lair. This part of the trail is always quiet. Too quiet.

This way leads down to the D&R Canal Trail, but we knew we not going there. Not quite sure what the State Park mask/distancing requirements were and didn't feel like dealing with that. We saw this overpass and wanted to go over and get pictures to share.

Looks like a bunch of kids put up inspirational drawings. You could read the backs, they indicated it was from South Brunswick High School. I thought it would be cool to put up one of our own "thanks" signs from Minty, but that seemed a little like vandalism, did the school get permission to do this?

Several signs were blown down, so these must have been up for a while. Only for humor purposes am I goint to point out the irony of this "We Can Do It" sign and that the "It" did not refer to the hanging of the sign.

The hospital is right over there, so I'm sure lots of heroes can see these signs as they go to work. No funny comments, just want to yell THANKS!

Okay back to the funny comments. We stopped in the shade of this tree for a beverage break, and noticed it looked totally chewed up by bugs! Holes in the leaves everywhere! Poor tree! Can we get you to the hospital?

I doesn't look so big in this picture, but this large hawk was slowly circling, and by the time we got the camera up to get the picture, another one flew into frame. Pointing the camera into the sun, we have to take those picture blindly and not look. It came out pretty good with those sun streaks.

It might have been the way the sun was reflecting off of the leaves blowing in the wind, but my friend thought he saw this tree on the right "glowing". Maybe if we took a picture, we would see a ghost? We daydreamed for a bit about evil haunted trees, has that been done before? This was right behind the Evil Supervillain Lair buildings...

This broken tree escaped the experiments? Is it the hero? Or maybe it broke free and now stalks the land. When we see the evil tree movie two summers from now, please remember Minty in the credits. And 1% of the merch rights, please.

Anybody know what "overlay" on the sidewalk means? Now I want to dig under this, because I'm curious.

We rode over to a ritzy shopping center, where the Ruth's Chris Steakhouse is. Rightfully expecting it to be a ghost town. No surprise, the fountain in front of the hotel was not running.

Looked like the gardeners were busy planting around the place. We eventually saw the work crew, but didn't get any pictures of them. They were all wearing masks but huddled together. 

I don't think we've ever been here when it was full of people, but seeing a large shopping area empty is unsettling anyway. You can get some good landscape photos, at least.

 We paused here for a minute because there was one family out for a stroll, and we wanted to make sure to give them a lot of space. They were not wearing masks and neither were we. They were very far away, but all the same lets just give them a minute to walk further away before we continue. And why not get a picture, we were next to some flowers.