New Year's Eve ride

Well, it's New Year's Eve today, and what better way to say good-bye to 2009 than one last bike ride.  Last weekend I was hiking out at Poto and it was very icy, so I figured I would stay around town and have the option of riding neighborhood roads if trail conditions have not changed.

I did a little exploration today instead of riding the usual city trails.  There were no great trail discoveries (not that I expected there would be), but I did find a few little hidden pockets of woods and trails.

Across Packard from my house is Brown Park, and the city recently made a fancy new storm water retention system that doubles as a wetlands area for various critters.  Ducks and geese have really taken a shine to it and they were out in force, hanging out in the water, on the spillway, and tromping around on the grass and pathway.  Judging from the size of those tracks, that was the handiwork of a nice, fat goose.

From Brown Park I took a pedestrian bridge over I-94.  I-94 offers non-stop cruising from Port Huron, Michigan, to Billings, Montana.  This particular bridge is between Stone School Road and Platt.  In the distance the Platt Road bridge is just barely visible.

On a hidden-away drainage channel near Varsity Drive more ducks were enjoying the frigid water, but decided they were not going to stick around to see what this human riding his metal horse was going to do.

Just past the ducks was this big ol' tree.  Not sure what kind it is, but the trunk was about four feet in diameter.  It is pretty cool to see the occasional survivor like this, that somehow missed being logged in the past couple hundred years.

These railroad tracks that look like they have not seen any trains in quite a while.  They end a couple hundred yards behind me at a building called the University of Michigan Herbarium. Not really sure why a railroad might be needed for storing a bunch of dried plant specimens...maybe the building was once used for something more substantial.

Continuing on, I found Car & Driver Magazine's new home.  They did not have too much interesting in the parking lot today other than a beat up European spec BMW 635csi with some not-so-good-looking aftermarket wheels.  As much as I like 1980's BMW's, this one did not have too many redeeming photo qualities.

I am also a bit of a "car guy," and for some strange reason I have taken a liking to 1980's European cars, in particular the smaller models from BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Saab, and Volvo.  My first reaction to this Saab 900 was that it is not old enough to be getting overgrown with bushes and slowly reclaimed by mom nature.  But at the ripe old age of 25 or so I guess it is plenty old enough to be here.

So that concludes my bike riding for 2009.  Maybe I will set a goal of riding the first day of every month in 2010.  I was just looking at my ride log for 2009 and see that I have ridden on the first day of the past four months.

Happy New Year!