Canyons

It's been interesting doing a lot of biking in San Diego. It has made my bike handling skills get much better in a hurry so it's been really good to be here for two weeks. Today we explored an area to the north of us. It had steep canyons so we were again able to work on hills. We have almost worn out our Bikeways map from using it so much. It isn't 100% accurate on some street names but we have a AAA map that we use along with it if we need to. Dave is a good map reader and gets us back over the correct bridge to our hotel; no small feat since there are freeways criss-crossing everywhere. We have been able to find streets with bike lanes and bike pths. One segment we did today is called Ruby Canyon. It was definitely a canyon and pretty. Too bad that the canyon was partially filled up with a noisy freeway.

It sounds like a bunch of folks from our tour group will arrive around Wednesday of next week and that's when we will move over to another hotel on Dog Beach. This one where we have been staying is a couple miles away. The hotel has been ok. If they would just rip up the stinky carpet it would be fine.
They are predicting a "winter storm" here. The wind has increased but I found out that my laid back recumbent position is more efficient in the wind. I was cruising at 14 MPH and Dave said he had to pedal hard to keep up. The weather reports are saying there will be snow in the mountains this weekend so I'm glad we're  not leaving until next weekend!

The bike path along the San Diego river has a lot of waterfowl. I took a bunch of pictures this morning so we will use a Birds app on our smartphones to figure out what their names are. We had a Great Egret come up pretty close to us so I got a nice pic. My phone does quite well at photos. I can choose to put myself in the shot too so I did that just for fun.

We have been so busy biking and seeking out hills that we haven't taken a day just for sightseeing. We do hope to get over and see Balboa Park, as a friend strongly recommended it. Someone else mentioned the Aviary in the zoo as not to be missed. Not sure we want to leave our bikes locked up there so we are hoping it actually does rain and we could do a strictly sightseeing day and use a taxi to get there. Our "winter storm" right now consists of the sun coming out again before sunset.

There is a lot of waterfowl along the bike way near our hotel.

This was a wonderful tree we saw on Point Loma yesterday.

Me biking in Ruby Canyon on a bike path.

American Coots alongside the bike path on Mission Bay

Longbilled Dowitcher (we think?)

Lesser Scaup?

American Widgeon