December 21, 2023
Oro Valley
New bird! New Ride! New Art!
Almost too much for one post, but I’ll do my best to keep this brief. First, the new bird; which in fact is not new, but just newly recognized. I’m not going to resequence the whole year’s count but by rights it should be bird #43, observed way back on January 12th. I stumbled across this photo by chance, scrolling through a year of posts looking for calendar entries. At the time I included its photo, noting that at first I thought it was a gadwall until later learning what gadwalls really look like.
I never did identify it at the time, assuming it was probably an unusual mallard or hybrid. In fact though, it’s a Mexican duck, a species I didn’t even know of at the time.
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I spent some time last night crafting a ride for today - a longish loop that goes east out Rillito Wash, south up the Pantano, and then back toward town along the Julian. When I review it with partner this morning though it illicits a frown and a disappointed tone of voice. It’s too like the rides she’s taken already this week.
So I go back to the drawing board and dig deeper, coming up with an alternate way to get to Oro Valley that avoids the temporarily closed I-10 underpass. In fact this has been in the back of my mind since yesterday anyway from when I first learned of the closure. Several possibilities exist for staying east of the freeway by crossing between Rillito Wash and Oro Valley, but most of them (Thornydale, La Cholla, La Cañada) are bikeable but busier than I’d like. The one I come up with though, Camino de la Tierra, works out quite well - it’s reasonably low traffic, has a bike lane most of the way, and is short - it’s less than two miles from the time we leave the Loop on Rillito to when we’re back on it again biking northeast along the Cañada del Oro Wash up the Oro Valley.
So, that’s enough to qualify as a new loop, and one that actually we might prefer over the one down the Santa Cruz and under I-10 we’ve always taken up until now. This route begins with the pleasant ride east into the university campus and then north on Mountain to Rillito Wash.
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We’ve only been on the loop a few hundred yards when I catch up with Rachael after stopping for that photo on the bridge, where she’s stopped to admire the New Art! We watch for a few minutes while an adolescent girl has her photo taken on the back of this new tandem and then hops off to get on the back of another one piloted by her dad and bikes off.
And it’s only another few hundred more yards before we come to another new Loop enhancement: a bike traffic counter, one stylish enough to probably qualify as art also.
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So that’s all the new stuff. The ride is great - we bike to our traditional stop at the picnic table near the end of this branch of the loop just south of Oro Valley Marketplace, and Rachael bikes her traditional extra mile to trail’s end and back, both of us arriving at the table at precisely the same time. We have a snack lunch there, enjoy chatting with a biker who’s down from Indianapolis for the winter, and then bike home. Very nice, and a ride we’ll certainly repeat before we head north, possibly with company and video next time so we’ll have a reason to post it.
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So that’s the day. As long as we’ve got the page open though we might as well have a look at tonight’s feast at Locale, a place that’s quickly becoming our favorite dinner stop in town. I wouldn’t be surprised to look back at the end of our stay here and see we made it out here about once a week. I wonder if they have a loyalty program for regulars?
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Today's ride: 44 miles (71 km)
Total: 453 miles (729 km)
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