Bikie Bikes

 Another nice summer day for a bike ride. It's getting to be that time of the year when we don't know how much longer before it starts getting cooler, so let's enjoy this while we can.

Since we avoided the D&R Canal Trail last year, due to mask restrictions, this year we made sure to go a few times. This group of pictures is from a trip when we went in the south direction. I guess you can't really tell that from this picture though.

Whoa! Road work? Is this a road? We were worried we would have to turn around at some point, but we never saw anything that would seem to have needed this sign. Maybe it was already done and they forgot to take down this sign. Slackers!

This stone wall used to have graffiti painted all on it, maybe that's what the construction was all about?

The other side of the trail had another solid wall of graffiti covered up. It's all so much blank canvas now. Do you think there's some hidden cameras in the nearby trees to try and catch rogue artists?

Traffic jam! By the time we stopped to got this picture, several canoes had already moved out of the frame, there was literally shore-to-shore boats out there a hot minute ago.

This part of the trail goes through a golf course. Is that the nastiest, most foul sandbox trap you've ever seen?

I forgot what I took this picture for. Sometime when I do that, I'll simply not post that picture, but also it might be fun to see if you can figure it out, too. I must have saw something to have stopped and got a picture, right?

This one I saw a guy over there about to swing his golf club, so I got the picture. He was taking like, a hundred, practice swings and did not actually hit the ball before we got tired of waiting and rode away.

We hit a parking spot on the trail and got a picture of the map, but afterwards we were trying to find where we were on it, and couldn't figure it out. Shouldn't there be a big "you are here" arrow somewhere? There's not.

Does "Bridge Tender" seem like a slack job? Unless some part of the bridge needs tending. Then,... I guess you better know how to tend it!

This picture did not come out as well as we hoped. If you look closely you can see a bunch of pretty flowers over there on the other side of that swampy-looking water. Blah blah something about even in the muddiest swamp there can be found beauty, or whatever. You can barely see those flowers, and that doesn't really look very swampy, either. Guess you had to be there.

The water ripple reflection is always super cool to see. Thanks, physics! Or nature! ...Or whatever we have to thank for that bit of coolness.

This is where the trail "went south" figuratively, and literally we were technically also going south. Can you see how wet the muddy sand is? It was plenty hot that day, and sunny, too. But the trail did not dry up for some reason. It was a combination of extra-effort to pedal through the mud, and mud splashing back up on us, that forced us to turn around. You might be able to see how far in the distance we could have suffered this path, and we already went quite far before we decided to turn around, too.

Where does this rushing water come from? This bird was also trying to figure it out.

We stopped to get a picture of the splash damage mess from the muddy trail. Can you imagine what my friends shoes and socks looked like? This is why we make sure to ride with old shoes so we don't care if they get all muddy.

When we passed this spot earlier, there was an old man sitting on this log looking into this hole. Was he waiting for something to come out? We took a picture to see if we could see something in there. Maybe our super night-vision camera could see what our eyes couldn't, but I can't see anything either way.

Word up, deer! There's a street right off camera to the right, you make sure to stay away from that, you hear!

It was hot that day and we were a little exhausted, so we walked the bike up the steep ramp back up to get home. We look down and see a chocolate pretzel bag and are like "C'MON! I'm exercising!" But also "Oh wow could I really go for some chocolate pretzels right about now!"

We had this problem before, and maybe posted this solution before, but our apartment complex does NOT have any kind of garden hose we can borrow or plug anywhere. So... Water gun time! This is a Nerf Soakzooka and it quickly blasted our bike clean. We then rode around the neighborhood for ten minutes for the bike to dry.

The next time out we rode our bike to the Princeton Battlefield State Park. I've taken a picture of this column thing before, they were brought over from Europe to be some rich guy's front porch. The mansion is gone, but those columns are too cool to take down.

This tree is doing a battle reenactment. It's over, you can get up already!

Took this picture of this plaque to stealthily get a picture to call out those kids having a picnic in the middle of that field. You kids know that like, thousands of soldiers died over there, right? Cool, cool. Enjoy your picnic. After all, right now it's just a huge clear field. How are you supposed to know? Oh, there's big plaques all around this place explaining it...

I just noticed that this plaque mentions who put it here. Is that cool? Seems a little bit like they are trying to include themselves into this somehow. "Yeah, that guy was a hero, but it was us who put up this plaque, so that counts for something, too, right? Right?!"

Last time we came here, this area was swarming with flowers and bees all in those bushes. I don't see any flowers, so maybe I shouldn't be worried that the bees aren't here either.

There's a canon on the back porch of the house. Every back porch needs a good canon. What about those bees? Stay away from the house, bees! We have a canon!

There is some kind of tech thing to do with your phone and these columns. Because kids these days can't just look at stuff with their eyes, they have to see it through the phone, even when it's right in front of them. See the guy in the picture? That the type of guy that buys a concert ticket and then stares at his phone the whole time recording it, instead of actually enjoying the concert.

I've got nothing to say about this picture except that it was pretty bold of them to put up a sign for that. If you don't get why this is funny,... good for you.