Climate change is weird - you certainly never know what you will get for weather from one year to the next.
This year we had the wettest month ever recorded in Ottawa and that was July! So far September has not only been very dry, but has proven warmer than July was. In fact September is about to set its own record, as the longest rain-free period ever recorded in Ottawa. Essentially it is like summer started after the first week of August!
Of course that did work out well for our end-of-August camping trip to Sandbanks Provincial Park and it has also worked out well for quadracycling and most other outdoor activities, too.
Today was one of these beautiful days we have been having - it reached 22C in the late afternoon, with a bit of wind following a dry cold frontal passage overnight last night. With the Alcatel-Lucent Bikedays over for the year, we decided to head out and do a local quadracycle trip around the neighbourhood for about 14 km, in the mid-morning. We departed just after 1030 when the temperature was a respectable 19C, not warm with the wind, but nice cycling weather. We stopped in at a local shop to pick up some groceries for lunch on the way home and I sat in the shade of a tree with the quadracycle while Ruth went shopping for vegetables. I even answered a few questions from passers-by about the Rhoades Car.
So far the rest of the month is forecast to have highs in the mid-teens and very little rain. In this part of the country we sometimes get Atlantic hurricane remnants coming through here, dumping huge amounts of rain on us, but this year has been very quiet for hurricanes, just like every year since 2005. I think we will have to take advantage of this late-arriving summer while we can, because the onset of winter has proven equally hard to predict. In the winter of 2006-07 we had no snow until mid-January and that meant a late season cycling instead of early skiing. In 2007-08 the snow was on the ground on 25 November.
I think the only strategy is to "make hay while the sun shines" or "cycle while you can".
Total quadracycling for 2009 so far - 316 km
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