Actually, a couple of days ago -- I RODE IT!!! First ride of 2020. We managed to burn half a tank of winter gas. There is still a lot of salt along the roads so we did only limited riding. If we go north from my house, the more north we go we see this:
salt salt salt
salt SALT
Just down the road from us the poor cows are finally able to get out of the barn and get some sun. The farmer is also glad to get them out so he can stop shoveling, well, you know what.
More cows. Cows with a real atti-tude problem. There's a lot more of them but too scattered to get a good picture from a moving FJR.
Olde fire station. The bridge is a turn table that opens to let big boats and sail boats up the Merrimack river.
There are seven turkeys taking turn dusting themselves in the foundation plantings ruining everything.
In downtown Newburyport this guy took our picture so we returned the favor.
We rode on to the Parker River National Wildlife Refuge. One side of the island is marsh, the other side is scrub, then dunes then the Atlantic ocean. The ocean in this location is really good fishing.
There is an itty bitty white spot in the center of this picture, it's a mute swan. There are a lot of swans in the Refuge right now. This is about the earliest that they have ever returned.
We rode about 20 miles on roads like this. The brown blur in the center of the picture is an immature bald eagle. There are about 10 bald eagles in the area right now. We have one that has started nesting in the area of our lake. More about the eagles later.
WTF. Look in the rear window of this car, I believe the car belongs to the Burger King king.
Downtown Newburyport museum, the back side is right on the Merrimack river and is about 1 mile from open ocean.
There were a lot of gray seals at the mouth of the Merrimack river where it empties into the ocean. This area can be a boating nightmare. These seals are why we have a large population of white sharks. Yum, shark food. This is also the trailing end of seal pup season. Now, back to the bald eagles. Yum, eagle food. The eagles have been out harassing the seals.
Out on the tip of Plum Island, at the Coast Guard station we found this guy taking his new-to-him car out for its first drive. He says it gets extraordinarily bad gas mileage. From the way it sounds, it has been worked on a bit and
should get bad mileage. He was so focused on texting with his phone we couldn't really talk with the guy.
And so ends another Grand Day Out.