Tails from the snowbound: week 6
Does anyone remember what I said on Friday… hmmmMMM?
Here it was:
It has been a couple of weeks since HB and I went cycling on the weekend. HB wanted to go the the park close to our home again, but I was able to convince him to go to the park I like best in cranberry country. Yes, it is farther away, but it has those ‘super-cool’ paths that are paved and curvy.

One of the beautiful things we saw on our drive to the park was a bog covered with floating cranberries. It was on HB’s side of the road though, so I didn’t get a photo of it; I was rather bummed.
But I was cheered up after we drove a little farther and saw this helicopter with the same paint scheme as my bike! So, of course I thought it was cool for that reason. It was hauling these big gray blocks from one spot in the field onto a semi-tractor trailer.

Well, HB pulled off on the side of the road, so that we could watch it for a minute. We speculated about what it could be doing. HB thought it was hauling concrete blocks. But that didn’t seem right to me. Because why would you have concrete blocks in a field and be putting them on a semi? And why incur the expense of a rented (presumably) helicopter to haul concrete blocks? Then as we were pulling away, I figured it out. I bet they were containers of cranberries!

There was no way to really know for sure. But I bet that’s what it was.
That was really most of the cool-ness for the day. We did see a couple of horses being loaded into a horse trailer near the end of the day. The bigger horse was standing on the outside, closest to us, and was really keeping an eye on us. I like to imagine that it felt its duty was to protect the littler one that was with it.
We did not go by the lakes this time, since they are out of the way of the bike trails, and we were both pretty pooped. I was feeling particularly out of shape after not biking for a couple of weekends.
I must say, it is rather annoying to have the sun go down as early as it does. Even at 3:00 p.m., the sun was shining right in my eyes and almost blinding me. By 4:00 it was noticeably colder, and by 5:00 it was dark.
One last picture shows how the path was covered with pine (or other conifer) needles. There are so many needles, you almost can’t see the edges of the path.

It really smelled like Christmas…
The perfect ending to our trip was that on the drive home, the bog with the floating cranberries was on my side! Mind you, this picture was taken out the car window while going 40-50 mph, but I was thrilled to get a shot of it.

I don’t know what this weekend’s plan is for biking. We have a lot of yard work, so we’ll probably stay pretty close to home.
Point of clarification: We did find out later that helicopters are often used during the (dry) harvest of the cranberry bogs.