My Actifit Report Card: January 10 2019

I went on an extra long walk this morning. Generally I time my walks so that when I leave the house in the morning I arrive at the parks by the river at 6am, when they’re officially open. Usually I don’t worry about the timing after that, I walk as long or far as I intend to and then head home. But today I used GoogleMaps to figure out when I should leave the parks if I want to pass by the craft store after they open, since my plan to stop there a few days ago was foiled by bad timing. So I went to Maurie Jacobs Park and the Owen Rose Garden as usual, but then headed south from there and kept track of the time so I’d know what route corresponds to arriving where I wanted to at 9am.

One interesting thing is that the new light poles on the riverbank path south of the rose garden are running now. They’ve been working on this project for a few months, with the wiring, putting in concrete slabs, etc. They’re pretty harshly bright in my opinion, I assume they’re LED-based, so hopefully they’re at least energy efficient.

My time-killing plan took me all the way down to Alton Baker Park, here’s a photo of one of the roofed-over picnic table sections in the early-morning darkness.

It was getting a bit brighter on the way back up the path. Here’s a photo where you can see one of the (decapitated) old light poles near the bench to the left and the newer one at the next bench along the path.

For comparison, here are the old-style light poles on the section of path north of the rose garden.

And because it was pretty, here’s a shot of the river as I crossed the Greenway Bike Bridge.

My timing plan mostly worked, I only had to kill two or three more minutes when I was in the vicinity of the store. But is was mostly for naught, because they didn’t seem to have the kinds of things I was interested in — either what I’m looking for is pretty specialized and they don’t carry it, or I just don’t understand where they’d put the stuff in the store and I was looking in the wrong place, or I’m inexperienced enough at the craft I’m trying to learn that I’m not looking for the right thing. Regardless, I got a nice walk out of it even if the retail part of the plan didn’t pan out.

Walking