Bike ride in Annecy

Here comes the photographer

Our rental bikes

At 10am the end of the lake is misty

Lawnmowing was going on - an uphill job

The sound of cowbells!

Moving to a different pasture - with the help of sheepdogs (cowdogs?)

So peaceful!

Spot the "castle" (this is at Duingt, a medieval hamlet) - there's another one down at the lakeside

Into ...

... and through the tunnel, where once train tracks ran

Remembering the days of the train line

Autumn on the lake

 This was the highlight of the holiday, especially those cowbells and the diligent dogs helping to keep them in line. It was lovely to cycle away from the traffic, under the autumnal trees. We didn't have a a map and found out later we'd been almost to the end of the track, the end of the lake. With quite a bit of stopping for photography, and for lunch, we got the bikes back within the half-day time slot - certainly the longest ride either of us had been on for years, if not decades.

Last bike ride of the season

Revisiting (mid-October) some favourite places in the Olympic Park, taking the time to get the camera out. And finding new things!

Walking towards the Velodrome, over the river - there's been lots of kayaking activity here

A discovery - the Waterglades wetlands area

Florid hillside! All those seasonal changes since the start of the sessions in May

Another encircled tree

Reminds me of a Klimt birch forest painting (or maybe this one)

The "mirrored bridges" -  two bridges at angles - the park reveals itself in layers

As the fountains were pretty much deserted (as in this little video) - no shrieks of delighted children - it was possible to hear the waters' rhythms and the different sorts of noises they made throughout the sequence -

Here's hoping Bikeworks will run these "cycling in older age" sessions again - I for one feel so much more confident on a bike now. Once you know how, you may never forget how to ride a bike, but it does take a while to build up a bit of bravado.

Autumnal ride

This week I'll be missing the cycling session at Olympic Park. Last week the park had a hillside covered in sedum and sedgey grasses -

 .... and asters under a birch grove -

 ... not to mention the great clumps of grass on the way to the velodrome -

 Their colours currently at their best -

 Various school groups were using the mountain bike area -

 I found my way to the Middlesex Filter Beds, now a nature reserve, and came across the cover of the central section - well you could hardly miss it -

 Further along, past the Nature's Throne sculpture, is the site of mills -

The water supplied power to the mills - to grind corn, a logwood mill to bore holes in (wooden) water pipes, and a cutter's mill to make pins - one workman could point 120,000 pins and needles in one day.

Walthamstow Marshes bike ride

Over the bridges, north out of Olympic Park, and along the "woody bit by the river" - turn sharp right at the narrow bridge and carry on for a bit, and you're at Walthamstow Marshes, flat and traffic-free.

I wasn't stopping to take photos, not at first anyway - I was riding alone, and fast. With no idea of how long it might take to get all the way round, and needing to return the bike at a certain time.

National Cycle Route 1 goes through the Marshes and the Lee Valley. At one point it takes a bend under the railway -

More of that mural another time. I certainly did stop to photograph it!

Round the top of the map and down the other side - lots of nature -

 And across the river, new housing around an old one -

Then there was this tree -

 ... an art installation, surely?

 It has an anatomical, surgical cast to it -

 Or perhaps it's related to nkisi figures?

Aha, it's called Intervention and it's by Jonathan O'Dea. I had some time in hand, so stopped to draw.

Back in the park, this tree -

A plaque in the pavement says that trees record time through their growth rings, and the metal circle around this red oak has the history of the site inscribed on it. It's not the only tree with a "history ring".

And on the way back to Hackney Wick station, the evolving swathe of flowers -

Middlesex Filter Beds

Last Monday's cycling discovery, turning off the familiar path, was Middlesex Filter Beds (river water filtering slowly through sand). It's also a nature reserve, and where the path ends is a large sculpture, a sort of Stonehenge, by Paula Haughney, Nature Throne (1990), of which these are detail views -

Elsewhere, giant hogweed along the river, a swerving path -

Ah, the river....

On the walk to the station, the corner of Hollyhock Heaven is now dense with verbena -

 the hollyhocks gone to seed (and what wonderful seed) -

 Other seeds have flown -

Mondays are cycling days

Last week we had sunshine and there were rather a lot of us, on a variety of bikes. I ended up with one with a bar, far too many gears, and a very hard seat!

First though, four of us had a spin on the four-seater - with much hilarity. Just one person steers, and those in front do the gears. It's the red structure behind the recumbent -

Apparently the park itself was very busy the previous week - school holidays - so the group went in a different direction, and we set out that way this time, over the big busy road via an orange bridge and then over the river and along it through woods ... across fields to the canal, and along to towpath back to the park. That towpath can be a bit narrow under the bridges; I was glad not to meet another cyclist just there. If you'd told me when I was 20 that I'd be such a scaredy-cat, I wouldn't have believed it.

Fish Island eatery, along the canal

New encroaching on old

View into the park from the towpath

"Stop here, appreciate life for one minute and smile. Oraculo Project"

A helpful blogging thing
The blog posts about cycling now have a label, at the end of the post - if you click on "cycling" it will bring up all the other posts with that label. This works for any label of course - and it also works from the list of labels that you'll find in the sidebar if you scroll down, and down ... it's the last bit of text in the sidebar. (Some blogs have a label list at the bottom of the webpage, in the footer.)

Labels are useful for grouping blog posts by topic, for example putting all the journal quilt posts "in one place" as it were - click on the relevant label and there they are. The one small thing to remember is to  use the same label; for instance I have several JQ labels, depending on size, which could be confusing. And lots of labels I no longer use, eg "clay books" because I'm no longer using those - but they need to stay in the list because the only way to get rid of the labels is to go to each post and delete that label.

A little thought about what labels to use, at the outset or before you get too far along with a series of posts, could save a lot of relabelling later.

warning: labels are case sensitive! More tips about using labels and searching a blog are here.

Tip 4 is how to search for multiple labels - you need to use the | character (I've always wondered what that might be for!).

The final tip gives you the formula for the URL for searching for a keyword within a label - wow, that's something I've recently longed to be able to do. So ... I tried it and got a torrent of html -