2024 Plans
Hi friends. It’s wintertime, so I am not doing any outdoor biking at the moment, consequently no bike photos. Instead, I chose this photo of a black-capped chickadee that I took last month in the Berkshires to start this post.
While my biking has been limited to the indoor trainer, I have been making plans for 2024, both biking and non-biking related. I will touch on my biking plans later, but I will start with my non-biking plans.
The big news is that I will be expanding my blog to have posts not just of bicycling, but also of two other passions of mine: bird & nature photography and travel. The driver for this change was my realization that many of my friends would have loved to see some of the wonderful photos I was able to capture on my November trip to Costa Rica, but that I did not have a good way to share them as I do with blog for my cycling trips.
To make this change, I am in the process of creating my own website to host my blog as well as photo galleries. Once it is set up, you will be able to subscribe to all blog posts or to only the categories that you want. My intention is to be posting a couple times a week. To accomplish this change, I will also be shifting to a new company to email my posts. I expect to be able to migrate subscribers over without any intervention on your part. By default, I will subscribe everyone to all posts. If you know that you only want my bicycling posts, just reply to this email and let me know. Like my bicycling posts, my other posts will be full of photos with some commentary between images.
Just to give a flavor of these photos, here are a couple of images from my Costa Rica trip.
Costa Rica has over 900 bird species. Here are two different humming birds species. The hummingbird on the right is the White-necked Jacobin while the one on the left is the Bronze-tailed Plumeleteer.
Here are a pair of Orange-chinned Parakeets checking each other out.
This photo is of a Rufous-tailed Jacamar. It is somewhat larger than hummingbirds and eats butterflies.
Besides photographing birds, I also did some macro photography while down in Costa Rica. This photo is of a side striped palm pit viper.
Upcoming Trips
I currently have 5 biking trips planned starting in May and ending in October.
My first outing will be to return to the Finger Lake region of NY in May for 4 nights with friends. The eight of us, four couples, are renting a home on Lake Seneca. Each of the full days, we will bicycle around one of the major finger lakes averaging a bit over 100 miles a day. We did this last year and had a terrific time.
My second and third outings will be back to back in June. The first will be a trip from Bend OR to Boise ID. I will then fly to Rapid City SD for a gravel biking trip through the Black Hills and the Badlands.
My fourth trip will be in September bicycling around Amish country outside of Lancaster PA. My final trip will be a gravel ride in the Shenandoah Valley in October.
I expect that I will generally be posting daily for each of these cycling trips.
In addition, I have a short bird photography trip to Florida scheduled for the end of February. Hopefully I will get a number of fun images to share with everyone.
I love to hear from any and all of you, so feel free to give me a call or reply to this email.
I hope your 2024 is starting out well.