You Notice Things Biking That You Miss Driving

I've been riding about 8-10 miles round trip each morning along the bike path next to the Plane Highway.  The first days on this route I notice the big things.  Here's a previous post that shows what I noticed then.

Like litter.  A couple of days ago, I started to notice how much trash there was.  Lots of plastic, fast food debris - cups, styrofoam.  Sometimes bigger stuff - mattresses, a refrigerator today on the other side, down a hill.  From a car, a lot of this stuff isn't visible.  The clear plastic bottles might just be a sparkle, or things are hidden by the grass.  But on a bike you can see them.

It's scattered around, not obvious, but I suddenly realized how much there was.  I wondered as I rode along how many bags of trash I could collect.















And then the next day, I got my answer.

From the point where the bags were sitting, there wasn't any trash any more, but they only collected a portion of the roadside.

Biking also gives you the opportunity to stop and check things out.  The red car along the side of the road was still there today, a week after I first saw it with its emergency lights blinking.





Sunday it had a handicapped permit hanging from the rear view mirror.

Yesterday (Monday) it was gone.




But there was a lot of other stuff in there.

And there was another car on the side of he road today/

You notice other stuff.  Like the telephone wires.  They go along most of the highway across the road.  (There are some on the side with the bike path too.)  Here are two other landmarks I haven't posted that show those wires across the road.

The Still Missing Wall lists people and the dates they went missing.  The wall looks different in a 2017 Maui News story on the building, which it identifies as a telephone exchange building built in 1942 at the navy air base.   And here's another source that tells a little more about the wall and the names.    If you click on the image, it gets bigger and sharper.


But also notice the telephone wires.











Here's another building - that's advertising for foster parents on that side of the road.  It also has the wires in front of it.

But in this picture, there's no telephone wires.  I took the picture because I noticed there were no wires, but when I wanted to take a similar picture, there were always wires in the way.  So I paid closer attention.  There's about a quarter mile (maybe half mile) stretch of the highway with no wires.  Well, there are wires, but they have been routed away from the highway and then back again a little later.  The thing I noticed was this:  the section without the wires along the west side of the highway includes the entrance to the electric company.  A coincidence?  Bears more research.

 Another interesting entrance is one to Maui Concrete.  As you can see, the highway above is asphalt.  But the road that goes to Maui Concrete looks like this:

Lots to see and ponder when you bike.  Especially when you take the same route for a while.  And walking, you see even more of the detail, but for a smaller area than cycling.

The Kealia Pond Nature Reserve had a tour today at 9am, so I met J there near the end of my bike ride.  There was a local couple with their 20 month old and 4 year grand children.  I'm afraid I didn't learn that much about the reserve, because they let me play grandpa with the kids.  Only two days left on Maui.  Then maybe we can catch some of the great October weather we've been hearing about in Anchorage.