Orion's Prophecies

Last weekend I put 110 miles on my bike with the scout troop. We rode from west point to ockanickon (ralph stover) 25 miles, got there after dark.
Next day we did a 55 mile loop around the Delaware. Down to Washington's Crossing, crossed the river, up to Stockton, crassed the river for lunch at Dilly's Corner, then back to Jersey. Then up to Frenchtown, cross the river and back down to Point Pleasant to climb back up to camp. River road has a large sections closed in PA due to a flood damaged bridge, which made for very low traffic. For those who don't know about Tohican Hill Road, it's steep, and long. About a mile long and crazy steep with turns in it. This makes it a fun and dangerous hill to go down, and one mother fucker to get back up. I was one of 3 to make it up the whole hill on my bike. Those not as fit or geared as me had to walk, and some of them still needed to stop for a break. To top it off, a lot of people dropped their bags off in my dad's car before climbing it, I carried all the weight I started with minus water. I dumped all but one water bottle for the climb. 52 miles
Once we got back to camp we posed for all the shutterbugs then went back to the site. This was when I became a legend. 100' of hose, a flower sprinkler head, a custom heat exchanger, and a good propane stove. We now had a hot shower in camp. Had to turn the stove down because it was just too hat after the bike ride. For 6 hours I was viewed as a god.
Sunday's ride home is 35 miles because we take a senic ride through tinicum township. It was so beautiful and I didn't have my damn camera. Of course if I did bring it, I undoubtedly would have fallen over in one of the creek crossings. One of the "roads" is dirt and crosses the tinicum creek 3 times, which is quite fun. We let the kids play in the first one, and eventually one of them hit a rock and fell over sideways into the creek. I'm just glad he waited till I was watching him. The ride went to Elephant, then Dublin, then finished up the same way our peace valley ride does. The stretch coming out of Dublin was the hardest one. We were getting tired and tired of riding. Then we started seeing signs for streets we knew. and the pace picked up. The lead group was down to 9 mph from a 14 mph normal riding average average. Te pace slowly started picking up after that up to about 17 mph through Lansdale. The last 2 legs, I'm not sure what happened, but we were riding between 20 and 25 depending on teh grade of the road. 3 wide and no one on the road, it was amazing.
It took me 2 days to rehydrate completely.

Today I spent puttering around doing little bits of this and that. I took the chipper down to my grandfather's house. And naturally since it hadn't been used all summer it wouldn't start. Checked the plug looked at this and that and finally gave up. I brought it back up and decided before I swapped plugs or anything I had to see what this squeaking was. I opened up the cooling intake shround and found these guys. (Yes they are alive in the picture.) I knew I heard squeaking. They had fallen to the bottom of the shround on the first pull, and the nest was taking up most of the space in the upper part of it. Their mother ate clear through the spark plug wire.
This is so you can figure out sizes of things. There was another one in the nesting material too.

Tomorrow we'll be closing the pool for the season.