Nature's artistry

Saturday
Temperatures were much lower today, but under sunny skies. It had been raining overnight, and after last week's experience I was a little nervous about cycling on wet leaves, so we headed further north on the bike trail, where it is more open in places, so hopefully there would be less leaves on the trail. Since it was still cool, it had the added advantage of affording us more sun! It' s a lovely stretch of trail, with a variety of scenery - some of it through trees, but much of it passing through open country, with fields and the occasional farm and barn. I took quite a number of shots, but the one I finally chose for today's blip was taken at Spring Valley Wildlife area, which the bike trail skirts for a while. I thought these branches sticking out of the water amid the lily pads looked like some graceful modern sculpture. A little further up the trail we came into the village of Spring Valley and discovered it was their Potato Festival. Unfortunately we hadn't taken padlocks for our bikes, so we had to explore separately. It was lunchtime by this time, so we got ourselves something to eat from one of the booths. So, all in all, it was a great ride - and, even better, I didn't fall off! For more shots from our bike ride, please check out my Smugmug gallery here.
In the evening we were out at a Symphony concert - Mahler's 3rd Symphony. I love Mahler's music, especially the 2nd, 3rd and 5th symphonies, so I'd really been looking forward to it, and I certainly wasn't disappointed. It's a really long work - 97 minutes I think they said, so it was the only work on the program and there was no intermission! The conductor was Rafael Fruhbeck de Burgos, who is 79! He had a stool to perch on, but just waving your arms around for 97 minutes with only a short break between movements must take it out of you at that age!

One year ago: Back-lit leaves