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This past weekend some friends from upstate New York (the ones who had a New Year's Eve wedding) were visiting and on Sunday we all took our bicycles on the ferry over
to Block Island and biked around. It was one of those perfect summer days,
sunny and warm but not hot.
We rode up to Southeast Light and then climbed down the stairs to the beach at the foot of Mohegan Bluff..I posted some photographs of those sights a couple of years ago and again a few years before that, so I won't burn up your bandwidth by posting
more of the same here now. (Although one of these days -- yeah, when I
get a round tuit -- I should do something about the domain that I had bought
with the intent of filling it with photographs.) So, instead of seascapes
and quaint light house pictures, here's a picture of me climbing the steps
back up Mohegan Bluff from the shore. See my new bicycle helmet hanging
off my backpack strap. It's much more comfortable than my old one. (The
day before I had biked into town to pick up a few things at the supermarket
-- just what would fit in my backpack -- and when I took my battered old
helmet off so I could call Nancy on my cell to see if there was anything
I could pick up for her while I was in town, I realized that I was only
a couple of blocks from Stedman's Bike Shop on Main St., so I stopped in
and bought a new helmet.) |
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After Mohegan Bluff we rode down the center of the island, past the airport, and over to Corn Neck Road. Our intent was to take Corn Neck Road out to North Light (where we had gone with Jill and Eli back in July) but hunger provoked us to stop for lunch at The Beachhead -- which seems to have become our favorite spot for lunch on Block Island -- where we always eat on their wide covered front porch with ocean views and island breezes and Nancy always orders a mudslide. After lunch we set out again for North Light but got sidetracked by the
beach -- so instead of continuing on to the northern tip of the island,
we settled for spending some time lying on the sand (Nancy and Barbara
actually went into the water) and then gave up on North Light and returned
to town where the ladies went shopping (not purchasing, just shopping)
and I got a huge ice cream cone (on a waffle cone) and Robert got a beer
and we sat and enjoyed the ocean breeze and view of the harbor until it
was time to catch a ferry back to the mainland.
Early Tuesday evening I was on the bike path by the Amtrak station when
I realized the clouds that had been building to the northwest had gotten
larger and darker and closer... and I began to see flashes of lightning
in the clouds and hear thunder. I started pedaling my butt off as that
storm chased me home. It began to rain when I was still two or three blocks
from home but it didn't pour until I got into the house. And then the lightning
began to hit all around. There was one crash of thunder that was so loud
and so close that I was looked out the window half expecting to see a tree
blasted apart. The worst of it blew over in ten or fifteen minutes and
(surprisingly) our power stayed on, but it was awesome while it lasted.
Today is another perfect summer day. It was actually a bit cool in the
morning and even now in the afternoon it is just pleasantly warm, not hot
and not humid either. Here's a picture I took a couple of hours ago. |
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| While I was taking that sky picture I noticed the butterflies around Nancy's
flowers and took a couple of pictures of them. I cropped the pictures down
to concentrate on the butterfly. (Okay, so they could be a bit sharper,
but I was standing eight or ten feet away and zooming in quite a bit.) |
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Jill just left a few minutes ago on her long-anticipated summer road trip.
She and Eli and another friend are heading for Minnesota (after a stop
in Pennsylvania) and then on to Seattle, Washington, then down to Oregon,
and returning back home in early September.
And now I'd better get this posted and get some other stuff done around here because Nancy and I plan on going to the county fair.
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