Category: Biking
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biking punta del este
The city of Punta Del Este has about 10,000 regular inhabitants, even though when you look at the picture of it you could easily imagine that it hosts ten times that number. This is because Punta Del Este is a huge vacation getaway for much of South America. All of the apartments in the high rise buildings are vacation homes. Punta Del Este itself is mostly situated on a big peninsula with beaches on both sides. The beaches on the west side are at the Platta river, the same one that starts in Brazil and flows through the Tigre Eelta north of Buenos Aires. The beaches on the east are on the Atlantic ocean, and you can see the fresh and salt water mix together off the tip of the peninsula.
We didn't have anything in particular planed for our day in Punta del Este, so we just took the tender ashore with the idea that we would walk around and check things out. However when we got off the ship and started our walk through town, there it was, Bike Tours! One lone woman holding a bike tour sign, of course we had to check it out. Her name was Alice and she said she could take us on a two hour tour of the city, tell us about the history and highlights of the area, and of course we would do it all on bike. Yay! The price was very reasonable too, so here's my digital shout-out to Bike Tours Uruguay Its a great way to see the town, and Alice even has other longer tours that will take you north into some of the other outlying areas.
After we got our bikes, helmets, and water our first stop was the most famous work of art in Punta del Este. The "hand in the sand" This was a sculpture that won a big art contest sponsored by the city back in the mid 1980's. It is literally a giant stone hand coming out of the sand on the beach. Here's Jane and I in front of the middle finger.
We continued our tour down the atlantic side enjoying the sites and sounds of the beaches. The picture at the top is taken looking north back up the beach. When you get to the point of the peninsula there is an observation deck to go out on, where you can enjoy the view looking back up the river as well as out to sea. On the atlantic side there is an island where many hundreds of sea lions live, that is another tour for another day... Some of our dinner table mates took that tour and said it was fun but pretty smelly when you get in amongst all of the sea lions.
When we got to the point our guide pointed out the island, and a small marker right off the point, and then another landmark off the the west. According to the guide there is a large but rather narrow triangle described by these three points.
Within this triangle is one of the places on earth that has amazing energy. Oops, now I'm thinking what kind of strange new age mumbo jumbo guide did we get ourselves mixed up with. But stay with me for a minute. This triangle also encompasses the Punta del Este lighthouse, seen below.
Now, right next to the lighthouse is a little park area with a compass rose made out of stone. You can see Jane standing on the compass rose facing south.
Here's the remarkable thing. When you stand on the center of the compass rose and begin to speak you experience something really amazing. Its like your voice echos inside your head in a really strong resonant way. When our guide told us about this I was extremely skeptical. I could just hear her telling me, "What you couldn't feel it? Its so strong I can't believe you didn't experience the power...." But when I stood there and started talking it was amazing. I'm not sure what causes it, but I did do some googling and apparently there are some strong magnetic forces that converge in the Punta del Este area that have been scientifically investigated. When I get home I'm going to have to do some more research to see if I can figure out what might cause this internal acoustic effect. (unless of course Mike has it figured out for me first) If you have any theories of your own, please leave them in the comments!
We continued to bike around the peninsula, and up the river side. We stopped at the fish market to see some sea lions, getting a late lunch, and from there we also had a great view of our ship as seen through many of the ships in the marina.
Sea Lions at the fish market
For a day where we had absolutely nothing planned this turned out to be a great adventure. Seeing a city by bike is great, it gives you a good perspective and allows you to see the sites from outside, rather than being stuck inside a car or van.
Today we are at sea the whole day, on our way to Puerto Madryn. There are lots of activities scheduled, and lots of time for reading and relaxing today. We are looking forward to a nice quiet day -- After we go to our first boot camp workout! The ship is also hosting a get together for all of the people on the Cruise Critic message boards, so that will also be a chance to meet some people in person that we have only communicated with electronically. So, goodbye for now, I'll give you an update in a couple of days when we are through Puerto Madryn.
polk county biking
Here’s a quiz for you… What do deer, old cars, a saw mill, and black bears all have in common? These are all things I regularly see on my rides around polk county. The countryside by our cabin is some of the best riding around, every road is paved and very lightly travelled. I can ride around any number of lakes and have all kinds of flexibility to make a route that is anywhere from 12 to 50 miles long. Bone Lake, Half Moon, Pipe, Balsam, Little Blake, Butternut, these are a few of the lakes that I loop in and through on a regular basis.
So, the other night I took my camera for a ride and focused more on the picture taking that the riding. Here’s my favorite shot from the night and you can find the rest of them here:
Incidentally, this picture illustrates where the bear comes in to the picture. This little pond is at the bottom of a little hill and around a nice little corner. One morning a came coasting down the hill and around the corner to see a black bear, he would have been right in the bottom right corner of the picture. I don’t know which of us was more surprised! The bear took off one way and I took off as fast as I could up the hill and past the pond. We’ve never seen each other again.
beautifulsoup, bonktown and growl
Here’s a little script that combines two of my favorite pass times. Python programming and cycling. bonktown.com is a great site that has steep discounts on road cycling gear. They only sell one item at a time and they typically sell that item until it is gone. I’ve gotten some great deals on clothing and other stuff on that site. Bonktown helps you know whats currently for sale in a number of ways, including a nice dashboard widget that pops up a notifier when something new comes on sale. The problem is that over time I’ve started to ignore the growl notifiers for bonktown, because I’m not interested in lots of the stuff they sell.
So, I wrote this python script that allows me to look for the stuff I am interested in buying. It works by having a file of regular expressions that I use to search the item descriptions when something goes on sale at bonktown. If the item matches something I’m looking for then I get a Growl notification. If not then I don’t hear about it.
Here’s the code:
#!/usr/bin/env python2.6
import re
import urllib
from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
import Growl
name = “MyBonk” # was BonkMe
notifications = [“search_hit”]
notifier = Growl.GrowlNotifier(name,notifications)
notifier.register()
# Read file of search Terms
myTerms = open("/Users/bmiller/lib/bonk_items.txt").readlines()
# Get the latest page
bt = urllib.urlopen("www.bonktown.com")
doc = BeautifulSoup(bt.read())
itemlist = doc.findAll(id=re.compile(“item_title”))
price = doc.findAll(id=re.compile(“price”))
desc = doc.findAll(id=re.compile(“item_description”))
for term in myTerms:
for i in range(len(itemlist)):
if itemlist[i] and re.search(term[:-1],itemlist[i].contents[0],re.IGNORECASE):
notifier.notify(“search_hit”,
itemlist[i].contents[0],
desc[i].contents[7].contents[0],
sticky=False)
This script makes use of several modules:
- Growl
- BeautifulSoup
- urllib
- re
I would have liked to use one of the standard library html/xml parsers, but I could not find one that was as convenient or easy to use as BeautifulSoup. If you can tell me how to parse messy html with one of the standard library xml modules please let me know.
a mid-winter cycling treat
Although the weather back home may have been below zero, in Northern california he sun was out and it was 68 degrees. Perfect weather for a bikeride. So after talking to the nice folks at the Palo Alto Bike Shop Wes and I rented a couple of nice demo road bikes from Calmar bikes in Santa Clara. Calmar is right by our hotel and the staff there was super friendly and helpful in getting us set up for a ride. Incidentally Calmar has no relation to Calmar IA. I road a nice Spanish BH RoadROM and Wes road a hot pink Trek Pilot 5.2. Even though the bike was pink we felt pretty good passing all the californians on the way up Old La Honda Road.
Rather than head out from the hotel on the busy city streets I decided to take Novian’s advice and head into the foothills west of Palo Alto. You can see the ride we took on the map below. This is from a cool website called mapmyride.com that I will use in the future for keeping track of my rides.
The ride was just beautiful even though we had to climb 2500 feet to get to the view. On the way up we road through some big redwood trees.
Once you get on Skyline drive you can see the ocean on one side and the Valley on the other. Here’s me, I look more tired in the picture than I actually felt! Really, Honest!
The rest of the ride is a long coast down Page Mill Road and then some flat riding past the Stanford Dish and the Stanford Golf course. It would have been fun to stop and play 18 holes but I didn’t have my clubs with me.
