Weekend Fun.

Since I worked Sunday, and long days Monday and Tuesday, I had my 40 hours in by Thursday. So, I took Friday off and went to ride at Millstone Hill again. It wasn't supposed to rain, but it did on and off all day, so it made for a wet ride. Fortunately, these trails soak it up pretty well, so no harm done. Anyway, followed the directions a bit better this time and wound up doing a 3 hour loop. Pretty cool stuff. Here's some pictures from that:


View from the "South Lookout". Kind of a dreary day.


El Salsa taking a break. Speaking of breaks, I didn't break a chain this time!


Another view near the south end of the loop.


A "grout" pile. Like I think I've mentioned before, this area is full of abandoned quarries. "Grout" is what they call the substandard rock (which is weird, since grout usually refers to cement). Anyway, there are lots of these giant piles of granite blocks around.


Rock of Ages Quarry. This portion isn't used anymore I think. The main active part of the quarry is visible on the hillside in the background.


Yes, I actually got a new jersey... The water is that milky blue color due to all the rock flour. In this case, it's not glacially derived, but derived from the quarry operations...


An anchor for one of the cables supporting the tower in the distance.


Oh no! The anchor pulled loose, so I had to hang on to the cable until they could fix it. No problem, even if there was a mountain lion attacking me at the same time, not to mention the rattlesnakes...

Saturday, I had plans to go canoing on the Winooski again with some other folks from work. This time, I had a different person in the bow, and there was a second boat along too. Jessica (a coworker) and I in "my" boat, Morgan (another coworker) and her husband Andy in an old Grumman aluminum canoe. Due to all the rain, the river was a lot higher than the last time. Some of the rapids that were more of a slalom course last time had transformed into big, rolling wave trains. Mostly no problems. Mostly. We dumped our boat a couple times and swamped it. Fortunately, the water was only about waist deep, so it wasn't too much trouble to get it taken care of. And, since we had girls along, they packed lots of food, so we had a picnic halfway through it. Good times.


Jessica and I near a covered bridge.


Morgan and Andy going under the same bridge.


Morgan and Jessica.


Looking downstream from our lunch spot. The upper half of the river is calm and meandering like this. The second half gets quite a bit steeper. Unfortunately, I was too busy paddling to take any pictures of that part...


Our lunch break spot. Nice little point bar. In the cut bank on the opposite side, there were lots of swallow nests dug out.


You can sort of see the swallow nests...


Nice trees hanging over the river. Really pretty. I forgot to mention it got up into the high 80's when we were doing this. Hot for around here.


Morgan in charge of the Grumman. This girl is always smiling.


Jess and I in the big green boat.


Yours truly.