Thursday, October 4, 2012

It’s Beautiful, Despite Wind, Rain and Cold


Looking east at Collins Road and F Avenue NE.  Never has a Fed Ex truck looked so good.  I'm where I am so my bike is resting in just the right spot so the magnetic traffic detector will be triggered and the traffic light will change for me, in case you wonder why I seem dangerously close to Collins Road.
I know it will be a blustery, cool ride home tonight, pumping into the wind with lights on.

But, that’s OK.  It’s that time of year.  We get a few freezes under our belts, it drives a stake through the heart of any remaining mosquitoes, and the brown of the winter commute will start to appear.  I’m ready.

This morning was unbelievably gorgeous.  As I started out on the morning commute a few minutes after 7 a.m., I felt like I was riding in the inside of a conch shell—the pearly white clouds and pink light of the rising sun, combined with the soft baby blue of a newborn day’s sky.  Well, it was a 10 of a morning.  It’s been so dry that clouds are a rare treat, and these were high and thin and broken, which made for a pretty picture.

So even a breezy, damp, cool ride home won’t break the mood.  I parked inside Warde Hall by my office (biker’s privilege, try parking your SUV inside when it rains).  What little rain we had blew through quickly, and frankly I would have been willing for much more.

But what a morning!

A much prettier view of the Iowa sunrise can be seen here, in a blog post from a former newsman in my old town of Muscatine.  That’s the Norbert F. Beckey bridge, that I occasionally crossed in the late 1970s on a 1974 Schwinn Continental to reach a nice park with a lake that was nearby in Illinois.

Nice as the morning sky was in Cedar Rapids, clearly having a Mississippi nearby made it even more beautiful in Muscatine.

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