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Travel

Traverse City Streets

Basil and I didn’t just ride trails in northern Michigan, but we meandered around Traverse City street a little bit, too. This was sort of a spur-of-the-moment ride, and I was (atypically) wearing street clothes

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Way too late I wondered if my Zefal toe clips would scuff up my new, meant-to-be-sort-of-dressy boots.  Much to my surprise (and pleasure), they didn’t leave a mark.  That was a good thing, because I wasn’t going to give up my ride to spare them!

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We’d missed the height of fall color, but it hardly mattered, with golds this wonderful.  Traverse City is full of arbor-decked streets just like this one.

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One of the joys of more-slowly settled less commercially-developed cities are the eccentric houses, like the stone one above. Housing developments have a harder time gaining a stronghold in more remote communities, where population growth is initially slow, and development inevitably more eccentric.

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Often an ancillary result is that flamboyant color schemes are tolerated in easy-going neighborhoods.  Here in the USA, planned communities and/or housing developments often have contracts which specify what colors structures must be painted. Orange is typically not one of  the approved shades!

Rough northern Michigan winters play havoc with pavement, but, in general, maintenance crews are up to the job. This is an average stretch of asphalt, with several obvious previous repairs, and one that’s still needed.

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This degree of damage isn’t much of a problem for a snow-worthy car, and it’s not even terrible for attentive cycling.  But it is important to be alert; there’s no way to maintain streets perfectly in this climate.

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Basil posed in the midst of curbside leaves; a week’s time will probably mean snowfall, and the leaves will be gone for good until next autumn. Clearing the leaves is the city’s responsibility, once residents have gotten them to the street; bagging this quantity really isn’t feasible, so the collection is done mechanically.

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It isn’t as obvious in the photo as it was In Real Life, but this is one reason skies here are such a pleasure:  that’s full sun on the left, and those are gathering thunderclouds in a very dark sky on the right.  We made it back to the house before the storm hit, and happily watched the showers from indoors.