Photography Blog © Arjan Quist

Starved Rock is a great State Park in Utica Illinois. It has a lot of hiking trails and beautiful views over the Illinois River. At this time of the year, there is lot of nice autumn forest colors, but the waterfalls were not much more than my dripping kitchen faucet The falls should be very nice in winter when they freeze into a icefalls, I will go check that out for you later this year… For more pictures, click the photo below.

Do you have the problem I had until recently of not knowing the local roads to bike on, loosing your way, ending up on a gravel trail on your nice road bike, or a heavily trafficked highway? Here’s how to solve this. Go to

http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/

This website, based on Google Maps, lets you create routes by putting markers on each intersection etc, and then exporting them to gpx format, which most handheld gps devices can read. And if it seems like you need to go on a more busy road, zoom in and switch to satellite view to check if the shoulder is wide enough to bike on. Now if you use an old Mapsource version, like me, you need to go to http://www.gpsbabel.org/ after creating the gpx file so you can convert it to mps format before importing it in mapsource and transferring it to your gps. The route I biked today shows up on Google Earth like this.

Although I am surprised how courteous suburban drivers are towards bicyclists (more so than Santa Barbarian drivers), next time I would avoid Naperville Road going up through Wheaton, where certain drivers got the ‘if looks could kill’ look aimed at their rear view mirrors after passing less then a foot away from the handle bars. Other than that, I have to say most drivers here go all the way to the left of their lane and give you plenty of space. But that said, you only need one driver who is dialing somebody on their phone to spoil the fun so keep your helmet on… I rarely carry my SLR camera on my road bike on short rides, but here’s a couple of pics snapped with my cell phone in the Wheaton College area (sorry for the bad quality….).

The Fox River Trail is probably the nicest trail in the Chicago area for biking that I have been on so far. Very scenic, mostly asfalt with every now and then a couple of hundred yards of mud. These pictures are taken riding from just south of Geneva to South Elgin (see google earth track below). More photos are found here.

OK, here it is, I got the blog setup, now all that is left to do is add content, which will happen in August sometime. So check back for cool photo’s, here is two of them to start with. Water droplet falling into salad bowl while washing dishes .

…falling into bowl…….

…and bouncing back up..