A challenge on Flickr is barbed wire and I was out after breakfast to try to get some good shots of the barbed wire down the road. I suppose the usual associations with barbed wire are negative ones like prison, war and concentration camps. It is used to keep people in where they don't want to be or out of where they want to be, it is aggressive and confining. However, in this rural setting it simply encloses a cow pasture and was very pleasing to contemplate with morning dew, cobwebs, autumn leaves, lichen.

There was nothing special about today's ride. It was short as are most of my/our rides these days. The predicted blue skies never made an appearance and the temperature stayed stubbornly at 11C. Our loop was through the forest on a kind of bumpy track part of the time, then on smooth roads for the ride back. The fall foliage is beautiful and although all my photos look somewhat similar, I can't stop taking them. That's also a reason for this post after more than a year of not blogging here. I want a place to show my pictures.

I am having a hard time getting myself out the door for a ride these days and the rides are usually short, just long enough for me to find a photo OP, then home. We are still having mild days, so I should be taking advantage of them.

A new challenge! Here are the rules in short. For more detail, have a look at the Coffeeneuring website.

• between October 6 through November 18, 2024,
• ride your bike 7 times,
• to at least 6 different places (you can repeat 1!)
• at least 2 miles round trip every time,
• drink 7 total cups of coffee (or another fall-type beverage), and
• document your coffeeneuring (either photos, Strava tracks, journal entries, control card, etc.) just in case the Coffeeneuring Challenge Committee and the ever-striving Intern ever conduct an audit.

Here are my rides with interactive maps and slide shows for each day.

Ride 1
October 6, 41 km
First day of our five day tour circling Munich

Ride 2
October 10, 54 km
Last day of our five day tour circling Munich

Ride 3
October 14, 24 km
Ride to Wessling where the cafe was closed, but found another - before the rain came.

Ride 4
October 18, 4 km
Baked my own cake for this very short ride to a picnic spot on the Würm, a pretty stream that runs close to where we live.

Ride 5
October 25, 21 km
A ride through the woods and coffee/tea al fresco

Ride 6
October 27, 27 km
Visiting with two granddaughters and one great granddaughter

Ride 7
November 1, 8.5 km
In spite of the beautiful fall weather, we were lazy and only rode far enough to have coffee/tea and some very decadent cake.

Today it sunk in that it is indeed mid-October. The days up until now have been mild and no rain. Today the thermometer read 9C/48F, grey skies and rain predicted for later in the day.

While I dawdled over my tea and read bicycle journals by people touring in Spain and southern France where it's warmer, Janos got into his biking pants and said he wanted to get out for a little drone flying before too many people were out with their dogs. He always tries to fly where he won't disturb anyone. Although his drone is very quiet, some people get touchy on the topic of drones.

Out he went and after a while my tracker on Komoot showed me where he was. I made a quick decision to surprise him. Without bothering to even brush my teeth, I bundled up and jumped on my bike. He was busy steering his drone over the fields and didn't even see me approach. Surprise!

He made a short video.

Of course I had my camera with me and got a few photos to capture the morning ride.

Taking another route on the way back, I again came upon some  mushrooms, one of my favorite photo subjects in the fall.

I was excited to find several amanita muscaria. I had been hoping to find one all season. Here there were about ten of them.

We weren't home long before it poured. What luck that we got an early start and were back in time. Neither of us even had a rain jacket with us. In the afternoon great claps of thunder and the ground was white with hail stones.

It looks like we are in for several cold and dark days if the weather report has anything to say. Until the end of the month. I feel like life is standing still if I can't go out on my bike and do my daily pictures. Not that my daily pictures are very inspiring any more. I've been doing them for three, or is it four, years now. The regular practice is good, but there are other subjects besides picture with bike. I always say I should get more variety, but haven't done it yet. In a rut.

But perhaps the bleak outlook has given me a bit of a nudge. I am going to make an effort with still life photography again. The light here isn't as good as in the old apartment in Munich. Time to take a stab at using artificial light. I know nothing about it. So I ordered a soft box, not very expensive, and we'll see what I produce. I need props, too. Maybe I'll start with vegetables. Maybe I'll see what e-bay Kleinanzeigen has to offer.

For the moment, I have no props, no attractive vegetables or flowers, just this branch left over from the bouquet that Piroska brought us weeks ago. Using what was at hand, I had fun and it was a start.

I can't believe it's been eight months since I last wrote in my blog. Sometimes I feel I need the blog, sometimes I don't. When I post in Flickr or my various cycling sites, I am usually happy. I almost always have someplace to go with my bicycle shots, either the daily documentation of my rides in Flickr, or writing up our tours in CycleBlaze, or having fun with the bicycle challenges on Cycle365.

Today I have a bunch of pictures that I snapped in my room, all mundane objects that make up my little environment. They have no place on Flickr, and no bicycles here either, at the most my helmet.

I have a lens that I want to get to know better, the Lensbaby Trio 28. That's what I used here, no systematic comparison of anything, just haphazard snaps. The lens has three different optics, the velvet, the twist and the sweet. Each different but I didn't compare. Just snap snap snap.

We don't use our car very often, but yesterday we had to drive to Munich for an emergency dentist appointment for Janos. When we got home and tried to open the garage door, the type that swings up, it wouldn't budge. I turned the key this way and that but to no avail. This morning I called the superintendent of the building and he came immediately,  but couldn't fix it. He said we were lucky that the car was outside and not locked away. I didn't bother to explain, but the real problem is that our bikes are locked away, we seldom need the car. Except when there is an emergency dentist appointment like yesterday.

​Next I called the building manager who will send a locksmith. I am waiting. It's again a grey and rainy day, the kind we have had too many of this summer. But I wanted to get out for a ride anyway. In the meantime I drink tea. 

My first attempts at creating new pages using the tablet were unsuccessful, at the most I succeeded in messing up the whole format of the website and spent the rest of the morning getting it straightened out. I might have to resort to writing my travel journals in the blog. This means the last day comes first,and, well, it's just not a journal. Perhaps I should try again, at the risk of messing up the whole website again. The other option is to write up my bike tours on my computer when we are back home. But I find it very unsatisfactory to try to capture the days in words weeks afterwards. That's what I got the tablet for anyway, so I could write my journals while traveling.

Writing up the trip when we are home takes a lot of time. I spend days at the computer, the words just don't flow. I also spend a lot of time editing my pictures, more than I would on the road where my editing tools on the tab are limited.

Now the technical part, how to add pages and blog posts using my tablet. I  discovered I could install an app on the device. Then spent a whole lot more time trying to make the app work. I'm not done yet.​

I've almost completed my journal on the aborted bicycle tour to the north. We covered half the kilometers intended before I got sick and we had to return home. Now I'm waiting for the antibiotics to do their thing before I get back on my bike for a longer ride.

​I'm eager to be off, the sumer is passing quickly. But there are obstacles, one being that my bike (which I love) might need repairs involving sending the fork in to the manufacturer's for a closer look. Bad luck that I got a bike with a defective suspension fork. This happens so seldom I was told, actually the bike mechanic has never experienced this before and he has sold a lot of Simplons.

To add to our load while traveling, but also to increase the fun, I have invested in a small Samsung Tablet to take along. This will enable me to journal and edit pictures while on th road. If I'm not too tired at night. And if we get back on the road. 

To beg the question I could just call it a ramble, or maybe a bimble. But I do like the idea that my walks, in the beginning quasi strolls, are becoming a bit more ambitious. I found this definition that I like.

"Walking is the basic activity of placing one step after the next. If you do this for any distance that brings you off your property, you are on a walk. Extended walking, but still leisurely, is a hike, I would say anything over an hour. You go on a hike for the hike’s sake, not to get to some place."

I like it because it classifies my outings in the woods as hikes. Yesterday I took a long walk or rather short hike in the woods at a faster pace and longer than I have been doing so far. In the beginning I dawdled with stops for pictures, but after the first 30 minutes or so I just kept going, only stopping to get my orientation on the maps on my phone.