Cortados and Towpath Fog

Delaware and Raritan Canal 

Holcombe Jimison Farmstead Museum 

Lambertville

28 September 2025

After Our Jeff's "Lahaska Loop" yesterday, I drove Fozzie up to the Holcombe Jimison Farmstead Museum parking lot to join Ken W and Ron M on the towpath to Frenchtown.

I'm not sure about how many years Our Jeff has led the Lahaska ride. I've done it for three years now. This time, he opted for a different bakery. The ride wouldn't be as hellishly hilly as it was two years ago, and it would be a relatively short 37 miles. Several days before the ride, Pete suggested we could get 12  extra miles by starting from his house. He lives 6-ish miles away from me. Obviously, I did the dumb thing and rode to meet him, Heddy, Rickety, and Tom in the center of Pennington. From there, it was mostly downhill to the PA side of Washington Crossing.

The rest of the group was Premeds plus Blob. We lost Martin along the way when his chain broke. 

Having begrudgingly attended most of the Wednesday Premed rides this year, I almost know which road leads to which now, but I'm still a long way off from being able to piece a route together in my head. 

The bakery Our Jeff wanted to try was Mama Hawk's. We arrived at 10:30 a.m. The line was at the door. At the time, we didn't realize that this line did not end at a counter six feet in. Some of our group decided to walk down to our old watering hole, the Lucky Cupcake. The rest of us waited in line. 

And waited.

And waited.

It was a good 15 mintes before we could place our drink orders. Being with Heddy, I was going to go for a cortado. The menu board described it as "4 shots." Now, I'm no barista, and I can maybe tell you the difference between a cortado, a macchiato, and a cappucino. But I can tell you that a traditional cortado, served in a cup the size one spits into at the dentist's office, does not contain four shots of espresso.

So we asked. The server seemed confused, as if it would not be possible to make a cortado with one shot of espresso and a dab of steamed milk. "Can we split it then?" we asked. Someone more knowledgable came over at that point and told us she'd split it. We each got a cookie, and I took the receipt to wait for our number, 23, to be called. 

"Seven," a barista called out.

Did I mention that the place was packed? 

Seven? How long was this going to take?

Jeff looked concerned. He hadn't ordered a drink. He went outside to notify the rest of the group while Heddy, Mike V, and I waited. Mike was number 25. We all ate our sugary things while we waited.

Fifteen minutes later, our drinks were ready. They handed us two small cups of espresso, no milk. I asked about the milk, took my espresso, and left the building. At this point, the line stretched out the door, through the front plaza, and to the curb. I was baffled. 

Heddy came out a few minutes later with her espresso in one hand and a cup of steamed milk in the other.

Tom had already left because he had somewhere to be in the afternoon. The rest of the group was getting restless. I downed the rest of my espresso (now with a spot of milk, a macchiato) like a shot of whiskey.

It was understood by all that we would not be returning to Mama Hawk's.

We'd climbed the bigger hills in the first half; the return trip was easier. The caffeine and sugar helped too. We got spread out on the final seven miles, which were mostly downhill. This was the way most of the Wednesday rides ended, a macho mile. This is where I traditionally drop in to the big ring and hammer, having survived another Premed outing and looking forward to thin-crust pizza at It's Nutts. Yesterday I didn't hammer because I still had almost 20 miles to go.

The ride back to Pete's was mostly uphill, but not steep, and with flat breaks. I went all the way back to his house because Heddy had treats from France for me that I carried home in my pockets. I ended with 59.5 miles. I did not Griff it up because my GPS had taken its time finding the satellites when I left the house, and I didn't know my real distance until I uploaded the ride later.

Anyway, back to the towpath ride.

I left home at 7:45 a.m. and took I-295 north. As the highway sloped downhill towards the Delaware River, a wall of fog appeared, so thick that the exit sign to Route 29 was obscured. 

I love fog, and I was happy that it hadn't burnt off in the 20 minutes it took to get to the north side of Lambertville, just south of the Route 202 bridge. As soon as I parked the car, I grabbed my phone and took pictures.

There were water striders in the canal, so many of them that it looked like rain.

Ken and Ron lead towpath rides so often that they know to stop at Prallsville Mills for a bathroom break. I took the opportunity to take a few more pictures as the fog was burning off.

Halfway to Frenchtown, as the feeder canal ended, so did the fog. It wasn't obvious, though, because the towpath up there is under an arching canopy of trees. It was peaceful. We were quiet. The only sound was the crunching of grit under our wide tires.

We didn't stop at the Bridge Cafe (where the bike rack has mysteriously disappeared); we went down the road to the Perfect Day Cafe.

I ordered a cortado. It was done perfectly, in a little glass, and I didn't have to wait. I had time to drink it slowly, too.

On the way back, I spent a lot of time talking with another rider who had come from Whitehouse Station. We were comparing notes on the evil hills up his way. Which is to say, I think they're evil and he thinks they're fun. We did agree that Rockaway Road is the best road. 

The sun was out when we got back to the parking lot. It reflected off the canal onto the Route 202 bridge.

 

Nerd Weekend

 

Bright Water Bog, Shutesbury, MA

22 September 2025

Warning: There are lots of close-up spider pictures in this post. 

Most of you who will read this post are probably cyclists. Most of you who are cyclists are probably on Strava. You already know I am not on Strava and never will be. I don't need to feel worse about myself than I already do, and my fitness is my own business. 

That said, let me explain iNaturalist.

Where you Strava people post your ride stats, iNaturalist posters upload photos of plants or wildife. Where Strava posts gather kudos or whatever it is you Strava people gather, iNaturalist posters hope for someone more experienced to positively identify whatever plant or critter they've seen. Where Strava encourages speed, iNaturalist encourages curiosity. Strava can be competitive. iNaturalist can be too: there are "bio blitz" days or weeks, where people try to find as many moths or whatever as they can. 

iNaturalist has become a source for citizen science, species discovery, and data for publications. You can read about that here or here.

I found iNaturalist in my quest to figure out what spiders I was seeing in my back yard. I started uploading photos a few years ago. Today I reached 1000 entries, which, compared to my naturalist friend, isn't much. I mostly post pictures of spiders I see in my yard or on vacation. My friend posts anything she can get a picture of.

It was this friend I went to visit last weekend. She lives in rural Massachusetts with her husband, her son, a large angora rabbit, some lizards, at least one tree frog, and a chameleon named Wali.

Wali eats pet store crickets out of her hand. 

The first thing that happened when I arrived, before the chameleon, was that a dragonfly landed on my chin and then moved down to my leg.

"It's a meadowhawk," my friend said. 

The whole weekend was going to be like this. That was the plan.

My friend's yard is a collection of found objets turned into art. I've been sending her my blown glass rejects for years. I arrived mid-day Friday and, after dumping my suitcase in the guest bedroom, I took a walk through her expansive back yard.

I vaguely remember making this orb.

I drilled the bottoms for her before I sent these vase fails. She turned them into chimes with pieces of old broomsticks. (For those who plodded through all my Hot Mess posts, the one on the left is a Moss Green Creep fail.)

There are all sorts of miscellany hanging from this structure, including glass fails that still make me shudder when I see them.

There was an abandoned house across the street. She and her friends salvaged pottery before the place was torn down.

Her yard is sunny. There's milkweed something that looks like milkweed that is, according to my friend who read this post, isn't. There was a monarch butterfly.

When she spied the jumping spider high up on the rear wall of the house, she grabbed a ladder so we could get a closer look. Platycarpus undatus, a "tan jumping spider."

There was a stand of tall flowers near the garage that was infested with red aphids.

We wandered towards the back of her property. They mow only small paths so that wildflowers and shrubs can grow. At the edge of a stand of goldenrods, we were about to take a path when I saw the web with its supports stretching to the flowers on the other side of the path. I followed the support closest to the web and found, nestled in the leaves, a large yellow spider I'd never seen before: Araneus trifolium, a "shamrock orbweaver."

On one corner of the wooden structure, near a pair of lavender glass fails, we found a Neoscona crucifera. I don't understand why the common name is "spotted orbweaver," because the only thing that looks like spots are the legs when the spider is hanging in her web during the day at the end of the season, and good luck getting close enough if you see one. She'll scurry to a branch or her hiding place before you can get within six feet. That's what happened to us. 

Neoscona crucifera is my favorite for several reasons. The spider that got me into this whole nerdy world was one. They're big for a backyard spider, which makes them much easier to photograph than the others. At night, I can get close when they're in their webs, and they don't seem to mind my camera, flash, and lantern all up in their faces. Each one's coloration is slightly different, which, if there are several in my yard, makes figuring out who is who when I upload the pictures much easier. I call them the charismatic megafauna of my backyard spider world.

This time of year, there are babies and youngsters. I've photographed enough Eustala anastera to know what to look for by now.

The common name is "humpback orbweaver," but it's not until they molt a few times that the little hump becomes apparent. This one was under two millimeters across.

Even tinier was this baby Leucauge venusta, an "orchard orbweaver." 

I learned to identify them by their red ventral smile. They grow around their smiles. By the time they reach adulthood, the smile will have faded to red-orange. This youngster will spend the winter somewhere safe and be one of the first orbweavers to emerge in the spring.

My friend knows all the insects eating the plants in her yard. This is a "locust borer."

There were spent flowers crawling with various life stages of "false milkweed bugs."

We both took pictures of this speckled sharpshooter because we thought he looked groovy. (Wikipedia tells us how it got its name.)

She found me an "amber snail" the size of my pinky fingernail.

We went to dinner in town. It was dark when we got back, and it was time to do what my friend does every night: take a walk to the fire station down the road from her house, where the floodlights attract moths. She knows her moths. I was teaching her to know her spiders.

She's the sort who will bend a stem, turn over a rock, and even poke at a web. Not me. My method is purely observational. "No touching!" I said when she poked at what she thought was a leaf and a spider scurried away.

It was one of these, a furrow orbweaver, Larinioides cornutus. I call them "corn nuts," and now she does too.

"This is a moth," she told me.  

"This is not a moth," she explained, as I photographed a caddisfly.

There was something on the wall that looked like a spider that had been put together backwards. Only when I uploaded it to iNaturalist did I learn that it was a "spitting spider," and you can read about why they're called that at this link.

We found some Steatoda borealis that are common down here in Central Jersey too, so much so that I don't bother to photograph them until the end of the season, when all the orb weavers are gone. These are the last outdoor spiders hanging when winter draws near.

After we did the loop around the building, we walked back to her yard to check on the spiders we'd seen earlier. Hanging low along the edge of her yard was another spider I'd never seen: Pisaurina mira, the "American nursery web spider." It's another one with a life history worth reading about.

The afternoon's shamrock orbweaver who lived near the house was out on the edge of her web.

The spotted orbweaver was sucking down a bug taco.

The shamrock orbweaver whose web was blocking the path was still hiding, but I found her legs again. 

I found more baby Eustala, and she pointed out a grass spider having dinner under the eave of a shed.

It was a good night for spider stalking, even though it was so late in the season. I climbed into bed listening to crickets loud enough to drown out my tinnitus.

On Saturday morning, we lounged about, then went to the local farmers' market in the next town over. After graduating from college in the area, my friend never left. From the looks of it as we visited the stalls, my friend knows everybody. The fact that the population of her small town could fit comfortably into my neighborhood probably helps too.

In the afternoon, she took me to the Bright Water Bog. I knew I'd never remember the name of the place so I took a picture at the entrance.

Back when I was on Facebook (three months clean and counting), I used to see photos she's post from this place. "Take me there!" I'd told her.

Scattered throughout are sculptures made from metal and sheets of glass.

I had three cameras with me: my iPhone, my newest Canon PowerShot, and my Nikon DSLR with the now ancient manual macro lens: the SpiderCam. I decided to test how well the Canon would do. 

For large objects that weren't moving and that I could focus on from a few feet away, the camera worked well enough.

I need to mess with the exposure settings on auto though. The bright sky was washing out the deep greens of the trees and the water.

I don't know why I remember "Joe Pye weed" from grad school, but I do. All the others I memorized with their scientific names. I hear the name in a classmate's voice. I guess I never saw it myself until now.

This one had fallen down:

We stepped onto a boardwalk that traversed the bog. That's when I found my first dragonfly, another meadowhawk.

I found a pair of mating meadowhawks. The female was dipping her abdomen into the water to lay eggs. I was standing above them with the Canon. None of the shots were in focus. My friend got closer with her phone and took better pictures. So much better!

Easy there, mister! Don't drown her!

We found a pitcher plant flower that was clearly on its way out.

This was an old beaver dam.

"What is the Latin name for cottongrass?" I asked her. I used to know this one. 

Eriophorum, damnit! I had to look it up. Grad school was yesterday 30 years ago.

Folks, I give you a mid-September New England bog:

"People leave letters and stuff in there," my friend explained.

I found myself ahead of her and turned around to see her peering at something tiny.

There were cranberries.

And another pitcher plant:

And sundews:

Soon after, another meadowhawk sat still long enough for my Canon to get him in focus a few times:

He moved to a nearby leaf and sat again.

When I went to upload this one, iNaturalist identified it as a white-faced meadowhawk. My friend told me to tag her dragonfly expert friend, because the dragonfly folks would know for sure. What happened after that was a nerd explosion, a first for me, and, as of this writing, the true identity of this pretty creature is still up for grabs. Hell, I'm just glad I got a clear picture of a dragonfly!

The trail led back into the woods, where I almost collided with a dangling Micrathena mitrata. I'd seen pictures of this, so I knew what it was. 

When my friend got close, she must have hit the web. The spider dropped, and she caught it, too late for me to say "no touching."

I showed her a Frontinella pyramitella, a bowl-and-doily spider who rests belly-up in a two-layered web. The bottom is the bowl and the top the doily.

I found a web and traced it back to an Araneus nordmanni, a Nordmann's orbweaver. I guess it doesn't rate a common name. This was my first verified one.

Neoscona arabesca, arabesque orbweavers, show up in my yard around the same time Neoscona crucifera do. When they're all young it's difficult to tell them apart. Arabesca end up fancier and are significantly smaller.

This wasn't the sort of walk my friends back home would do. We moved slowly, scanning the sides of the trail for little things. My biking buddies would never tolerate a walk like this. Not enough cardio. Too slow.

This is a six-spotted fishing spider, Dolomedes triton. These catch fish. For real.

My friend knows her fungi too. I don't bother.

She turns over logs and finds salamanders.

She turns over logs to get both sides of a mushroom for better identification.

She told me this is called "celery root." (No, she didn't. She told me it's "cucumber root.")

She swung the left pendulum. It hit the red tube and rung out.

She went through the door.

We were near the end of the loop, at the edge of the bog, when a teenager caught something with his pole. "That line's gonna snap," my friend said. The rod and line were bent almost parallel. 

He reeled it in, excited.

"Mom! Mom! Get the camera! Oh my god! Mom! I'm gonna get a badge for this! It's a record!"

"What is it?" I asked.

"A large mouth bass."

"Mom! Where's the scale?"

"In the car."

"Get the scale! Oh my god! This one's a record!"

He put the hook back in and set the fish in the water while his mother hurried back to her car.

My friend pointed out another plant, bright red.

I was forgetting all the common names as soon as she said them. They all sounded alike to me. "Meadow sweet" or "sweet meadow" or "tufted hen's ass" or whatever. Give me the scientific name. I'll remember that. (She tells me it's "Virginia meadow beauty," so I wasn't that far off.)

There was one more place she wanted to take me because I'd never seen an Argiope. We drove to the edge of an open field, part of a conservation area, where she'd seen Argiope before. I knew what they looked like from pictures, in an abstract sort of way, but I didn't have a good search image in mind.

She found the first one in the tall gras. It took me a minute to see what she saw: Argiope trifasciata, the "banded garden spider."

We climbed into the meadow, and all of a sudden I saw them everywhere.

I couldn't stop taking pictures. 

The newer the spider, the more pictures I take. The bigger the spider, the easier that is.

I found a male that had seen better days. He was so much smaller than the females.

And some females were much bigger than others.

"Mom! Mom! Get the camera! Get the scale! This one's a record! Mom!"

This male had all its legs. There's a blurry female in the foreground. My Nikon's macro lens has no depth of field.

"I'm thirsty," I said. "I could use a smoothie or something."

"I want a ginger milkshake."

"Ew!"

She knew just the place: Flayvors of Cook's Farm. It was a little stand in front of a big dairy. We slurped on our drinks and watched the cows.

There were two that seemed bonded. They followed each other around, nuzzled each other, and, twice, one tried to mount the other. They were both females. That makes this blog post woke. Disappear me.

We stoped at Trader Joe's to pick up some pasta for dinner, and then we went to her friends' house to feed their cat while they were away. This is Hilary. He's 17, I think she said.

I'd left my car up at the firehouse the night before so that my friend's son could get his car out of the driveway. Her town is so small that this sort of thing is allowed. We went to get my car and, from the top of the little hill, we were treated to the last of the sunset.

I uploaded my spiders while she cooked. I was still organizing the pictures -- I add the date to the filename and create folders for each species -- at 11:00 p.m. She was thumbing through iNaturalist, verifying species for other users.

"It's time to go out," she said.

"More?" I'd thought she'd had enough of this, but I realized whom I was talking to.

I grabbed the lantern and SpiderCam. She found a small flashlight. 

The shamrock orbweaver by the house was still tucked in. 

The one on the path was out.

"We've seen them for two nights," I said. "That means they get names."

The spotted orbweaver was Harriet.

The house shamrock was Mimi, and the path one Eunice.

I found more small Eustala anastera.

Each one is different.

I found a baby Missumesus oblongus, an American green crab spider.

I saw a shimmer of a dot near the top of the wooden structure across from Harriet's web. "You have your own corn nut!" I told my friend.

Avast ye matey! Arr! A pirate spider!

These spiders are real jerks.

It was almost 1:00 a.m. by the time I climbed into bed. I woke up early the next morning anyway, without an alarm.

I sneaked towards Harriet's web because she was in it. She must have been able to detect vibrations in the ground because, true to form, I couldn't get anywhere near her before she scurried up into her stick. 

Mimi was nestled in her dead flower, accompanied by a false milkweed bug.

Eunice was hiding too.

I'd seen Argiopie trifasciata, but I hadn't seen Argiope aurantia. "They used to be in my yard," my friend said, "but I haven't seen them this year." Her naturalist friend, the one who got the dragonfly nerdfest going on my iNaturalist page, had seen one in a meadow near his house.

We got to the meadow by walking through the Amethyst Brook conservation area woods.

People were out walking, some with their dogs. We passed a pair of Adirondack chairs some folks had left by the water for anyone to lounge in. Farther along, there was a hut made from branches, a teepee of sorts.

The meadow was a farm field, which had recently been plowed. We walked along the edge, looking for any signs of arachnid life.

The closest I got was this orb weaver, whose identity remains unknown on iNaturalist.

Tucked into a leaf next to a large web was what was probably a Neoscona crucifera. I bent the stem a little, but abided by my no touching rule. Don't bother the spiders. If I can't see it, I can't photograph it. 

I circled half the field, then walked across the dirt to get back to the woods. We approached from the other side of the teepee.

It was getting on towards noon. I had a 5-hour drive ahead of me. But there was the matter of the bridge spiders my friend had seen. I wanted to see them too.

It was the wrong time of day, though. All I found was this lone baby corn nut.

We gave up and drove back to her house.

All in all, though, it was a sucessfully nerdy weekend. I found 24 identifiable spider species and a handful of unknowns. I finally got a dragonfly in focus, even if the debate over what I saw rages on. 

The weekend was a new experience for me; my friend does this every day.

But just because I was back in New Jersey didn't mean the nerdfest was over. While I was away, my colleague had sent me photos of four different spiders in her yard, asking me to identify them for her. And I had the crew in my yard to take pictures of at night too.

Before I left for Massachusetts, I'd taken note of the spiders gracing the south-facing window of our laboratory building. They show up each fall, usually only Larinioides sclopetarius, but this year there was a Neoscona crucifera in the mix.

I'd thought their season here was over, but now we had two in my colleague's yard, the one in the window, and Harriet up north.

The contest was on. Who would be the last spider hanging?

I named the lab spider Smudge for two reasons: first, from afar, she looked like a dark smear of dirt on the window; and second, because of the thick window and the light reflecting off it, I could never get a picture in focus with my phone. Finally, on a mid-week afternoon last week, she turned her back to the window and I managed an almost in-focus picture.

The record for the last Neoscona crucifera in my yard was held by Peachy, the six-legged blonde who I last saw on September 17 of that year. Now Smudge was here to challenge that record.

At home, the contest had shifted to Araneus thaddeus, the lattice orbweaver. Much smaller by comparison, these spiders are in my yard from late spring on, but they seem to come and go. Only now do I get females who stay put. They start the year as tiny lemon drops, bright yellow all over. As the season progresses, their legs get darker, turning bright orange. Their abdomens go from yellow to pink.

They're usually skittish and will hide in their silk-coccooned curled leaf. The two I have right now are positioned slightly above my head. I'm able to photograph them without scaring them. 

The bigger one is named Duck because I have to remember to in order not to crash into her branch. She lives in a forest peony redbud near my deck. Her abdominal pattern looks like a cross between Chucky and at Tim Burton drawing. Very Halloweeny.

Over in a Rose of Sharon is Ethel. She's smaller, less yellow, less spooky, and higher up.

Last Thursday night, I got a surprise: a new Neoscona crucifera!  Now it was a four-way competition.

The orange newcomer was a one-night stand. Harriet disappeared. 

Smudge was still there on Friday.

I managed a slightly fuzzy photo of one of the many Larinioides sclopeatarius in the window.

I decided to go to Mercer Meadows after work on Friday to look for Argiope. While I found a few spiders, I didn't find what I was looking for. I stuck around for the beginning of sunset.

Today I broght SpiderCam to work with me, hoping to get an in-focus picture of Smudge. She was tucked away in the eave of the window, a pair of legs sticking out. I took a picture to document her presence. I'm waiting to find out if the second Neoscona crucifera at my colleague's house is still around. Smudge might be the winner, even if all we saw were her legs.  I wasn't the only one checking on her all day today. My colleage was too. She's fond of Smudge now. She's sad that Melissa is gone. "This is what happens when you name your spiders," I told her. "Never take your spider for granted. They always leave."

Near the back door of our building is a female Larinioides sclopetarius. I tried, last week, when it was sunny, to take her picture with my phone. That required getting close and casting a shadow. She was having none of it. With SpiderCam and a cloudy day, I was able to approach unseen and keep my distance. I finally got a picture of her. Isn't she pretty?

If you've read this far and haven't passed out, congratulations! Grab your phone and get yourself an iNaturalist account!