I’ve been guilty of ignoring my blog again. My fossil hunting fell by the wayside a bit this year. I made a couple of early year trips, but didn’t find anything worth posting, and my surgically repaired left knee gave me so much pain after hiking to hunt, that I didn’t make more trips. I’m thinking my knee is finally enough better to allow for some creek/river hiking, but the bursitis in my right elbow is so bad now that it isn’t going to happen anytime soon. Old age is hell. I did make a guided fossil hunting trip while in Florida in May that yielded lots of shark teeth, but I never took individual photos of them and tried to explicitly identify all of them for a report here. I just treated some of the best ones for display, and added them to my coffee table display.

My bicycle riding this year, as in other recent years, has just been short local solo rides. My route lately has been ever evolving due to all the construction on area roads. I missed quite a bit of riding in January with a nasty cold, and the week in May when I was in Florida, but the rest of the year, I’ve been pretty diligent about getting my rides in, and have ridden 100 miles or more a week, quite a few times. My monthly riding mileages are as follows:

January – 105 miles
February – 385 miles
March – 454 miles
April – 428 miles
May – 256 miles
June – 411 miles

That gives me 2,110 miles ridden in the first half of 2024. That puts me on a pace to get more than 4,000 miles on the bike this year, which seems to be a worthy annual mileage goal for me these days. I’m still a lot slower on the bike than in my best years, and as exhausted after a 35 mile ride these days as I used to be after a 200k ride. I’ll say it again: Old age is hell.

My April 25th route.