What a difference a few hours can make?… the fog is gone and the sunrise was back.

After an early pink glow behind some creepy-cool trees (weeping birch?), I was headed down towards Navy Pier when the sun finally made it over the horizon.

And then early enough… and we had a surprising “spoke eclipse”?!!!
Okay, well… err… it’s actually the magnetic sensor for my bike computer, but who’s counting?!

Calming orange skies this morning on the lakefront. Very quiet. Very serene.

And then I looked behind me… with a surprise full moon still hanging out in the Western skies.
Fun in both directions!

But back to the sunrise…
We also had low flying clouds that kind of “split” the sun in half as it came over the horizon.

This morning was wetter than I expected.

The normal morning routine is to get up early, step outside onto my back porch and check the weather. if it’s wet, raining, snowing or frozen, I generally skip the ride. But for some reason this morning when I checked, it looked pretty good. So I got up, got dressed and hopped on my bike. Only to find that it must have rained recently as the roads were all still wet. And you know I couldn’t turn around at that point!  I was just glad that I still had my rear fender on so I wouldn’t get that “squirrel tail” stripe up my back!

Turns out the cloud cover made for a nice sunrise though!
Until that one “last” cloud took over.

The morning started out with some great clouds popping along the skyline. But as the morning progressed, and the sun was getting ready to emerge, the groovy clouds had moved on. I had high expectations for a really cool sunrise. That didn’t happen. But what we were left with was pretty darn sweet nonetheless.

Some mornings it’s all about the clouds…

Today was one of those days.
So beautiful in their ever-changing, ever-moving, dramatic float across the sky.

Every few minutes, an entirely different cloudscape as they blew in, blew out, & dissipated across the sky. We never really got the beautiful, glowing orange sunrise. But sometimes a bunch of clouds are just as cool.

This morning I just couldn’t stop taking photos.
The cloudscape just kept changing & moving. I ended up with a total of 144 photos from this morning’s bike ride alone. And that number seems really gross.

After two days of being “all-focused” on my taxes, it felt great to finally get back out on my bike. Even if it was windy, cloudy and threatening rain! It was still fun… and it felt GREAT.

And it was good to see that I wasn’t the only crazy one out there so early in the morning!

With so many clouds… the sun popped up, and then promptly disappeared again!

A couple more welcoming signs of Spring…
buds coming out on the trees and the winter snow-fence coming down along the lakefront. Surely that means that warmer weather can’t be far behind, right?!

Another quiet morning. Subtle colors. Wispy clouds. Calming waves. Quite serene.

After a warm weekend, I must admit that I was somehow oddly surprised by the chill in the air this morning?! I guess I was assuming Spring was here??? On Sunday’s ride I had started with fewer layers than normal, and actually took off even more as I was riding. Good thing I started out with ALL the layers this morning!!!

But as always, the chill was worth it… with a sunrise this beautiful.