It is a day after the autumnal equinox so today is the first full day of fall.  Checking with the weather underground, dawn was at 6:49 local time and surprisingly there was 12 hours and 5 minutes of daylight today.  I would have thought that there would have been more night then day.  I got up at five to go biking in the Park.  I had all my bike lights, three headlights and two tail lights.  I rolled out of the house at 5:20. 

Yesterday they had closed the Hampton overpass as part of the New I-64 construction.  Hampton is the main entrance/exit to the Park.  I was pleasantly surprised to find that the amount of car traffic through the Park had been greatly reduced.  I took advantage of the reduced traffic to ride mainly on the roads.  The roads are much better lit then the bike path is and even with all my lights I tend to slow down in the dark while on the bike trail.  When they renewed the Park they added a lot of lighting.

There was fog in the low parts of the Park and an almost eerie quiet and stillness throughout the Park.  Near the north eastern end of the Park you could occasionally here the Metro-Link trains go by.  As you drew closer to the southern edge of the Park the highway traffic noise would grow.  My bike was quiet, except for some occasional worn chain noise.  Throughout the Park the chirping of too late for Summer crickets filled the auditory void.  Otherwise it was quiet, at least until six.

After six the birds started waking up and making notes.  The ROTC class started calling out the cadence of their calisthenics, beneath the obelisk to the Confederate war dead.  Dawn started to appear in the eastern sky.  More joggers and walkers started to appear and just before I could doubt my sanity a deluge of other cyclist appeared.  The sanity rule is that I must see at least six other cyclists or wonder what the heck I was thinking when I decided to go biking.  One of the other cyclists, was one of the many Marks on Team Kaldi’s.  It was still before dawn when I left the Park.  I got 21 miles.