Swamp Ride

Well, 2 years later and no posts in between. My bad. There have been quite a few rides during that time, though not as many as I'd like to be able to claim. Health issues and motivational issues were the main problems.

I took a nice ride today with friends John and Steve around and through the Great Swamp. It was a fantastic day for a ride - even though it's November, the temperature got up into the low seventies. I played with my Garmin again, and used the excellent GPS Visualizer site to create a climb profile, a Google map, and a Google Earth file. Here's the climb profile:

Pretty cool app, eh? I haven't figured out how to place a Google map on the blog, or how to attach a Google Earth kmz file. But here's a screen shot of the map, showing the route:

We started on Valley Road, heading west, then went up through Basking Ridge, behind the Verizon headquarters, and finally down Long Hill Road through the Great Swamp - about 22 miles in all. We took a detour on Whitebridge Road to visit the Raptor Trust; John had never been there. They take in injured raptors (owls, hawks, eagles, and so forth) and care for them. The birds are wonderful to look at.