Category: Outdoors

This weekend, Doc and I went up to Sacramento for the Broken Strings Music Festival, and we decided to also camp at Folsom Lake SRA. Unsurprisingly the lake is really low right now. Like, really low.

The sun-baked martian wasteland left behind in the lake bed was fun to explore, but perhaps not as fun as tubing around on a nice big lake.

We still got to swim around in the American River, though. But let me tell you this: I am suspicious of fresh water. Like, ultra paranoid. Having grown up in and around oceans, I feel like swimming in fresh water can only ever lead to weird brain-eating amoebae or flesh-eating bacteria or blood sucking leeches or even blood-sucking fishes. This is what swimming in lakes and rivers means to me.

I still swam around in the American River for an hour or two, though, and had a lot of fun. I wouldn’t shut up about leeches, though.

I also ended up taking the Leaf on a mighty journey:

111 miles each way. My original plan was to also go to Placerville for some climbing, but it was way too hot out there that climbing would have just been brutal and not fun, so Folsom was the end of the line for us this time. If we had gone to Placerville, that would have been ~136 miles each way.

On the way there we only had to fast-charge once, in Vacaville, because I charged the Leaf to 100% at home the night before and I also had access to level 2 charging in Sacramento while we dorked around there. Although I should mention that ~80% of the level 2 charging stations in Sac-town are in garages which are CLOSED on the weekend. Which is… frustrating. Pretty much everything in that town closes for the weekend, because a lot of the government workers prefer to live in the Bay Area and they take the train to Sacramento every day and it turns into a ghost town whenever they don’t commute in. A weird side effect of being the state’s capitol, I guess.

On the way home, however, I was unable to get the charge up to 100% at any point, so we had to charge twice: once in Davis and once in Vallejo. Oh, well. I had originally planned on using the level 2 charging to get it up to 100% for the ride home too, but alas we were running around so much doing other things that this didn’t really happen. Still it wasn’t too bad.

So, today I discovered that you can go up in the observation tower of the DeYoung museum for free. Interesting!

It seems like I discover something new every time I go to Golden Gate Park.

This post is an update on our resident pheasant (from last week). I decided that I wanted to get a photo of the pheasant for this blog, but I was scared that he would attack me again.

Nonetheless, on Monday I set out to see what kind of shot I could get, only to find that the pheasant was beat up pretty badly. I didn’t know if it was a car or what, but he was in a bad way. He didn’t even bother trying to attack me, he just sat there glaring at me, and occasionally hobbling around pathetically. I really felt bad for him. Even though I hated him, he did not deserve this. But it did make it easy to get a photo.

I later found out that the pheasant had tried to attack another bicycle commuter, and got tangled in the spokes as it dove into the wheels for its attack. He says that he stopped immediately to try and free the pheasant, as it looked like its neck would snap. And as soon as it was freed it resumed attacking him, totally unphased.

Throughout the week, I noticed that the pheasant had moved to a new location away from the road, and it seemed more skittish. It was a new bird. A humble pheasant, a sad pheasant, and a “oh cyclist how good it is to see you” pheasant. I felt really happy that it was doing better, and it seemed like this whole ordeal would really turn out to be for the better since it seemed to teach him not to attack everything.

But then he got too healthy. And that stupid bird was waiting for me on the road Friday evening after work, and he chased me all the way up that damn hill again. I mean, for fuck’s sake! How did I ever feel sorry for that stupid bird?? Ugh.

At the end of all things, we are destined to die at each others’ hands, locked in eternal combat.