On Saturdays from May until September, Hines Park closes Hines Drive from 8 AM to 3:30 PM so that people can ride bicycles, walk and rollerblade in the road and not have to fear traffic.

They close the road from Outer Drive and Hines Drive (near Ann Arbor Trail in Dearborn) all the way to Hines Drive and Ann Arbor Trail (where they cross is about 12+ miles away? 7 miles?). Many of the parks along that route are open, you just need to access them from a road other than Hines Drive. The parks are the two ends are semi-barricaded off, but it does say you are allowed to drive around them at Outer Drive to get to Helms Haven Park and at Ann Arbor Trail to get to Nankin Mills Park.

The video has a bit of the Rouge River and some geese and baby geese (goslings?). At the end it was later and the road was open, but all the times I shot video, I think I’m on the sidewalk.

Video and photosynth both shot, edited and uploaded from my iPhone 4s. It’s not very fancy edited, just put a few clips together (trimmed a few) and added a (tiny) bit of text.

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I was out biking this weekend (again) and was playing with a new camera (not mine) and as I was biking along I saw a dear up ahead.

I got some stills and some video. But I was still standing there on the bike so I’m not the steadiest I could be. At the end I was at 14x which also contributes to the extra shakiness and I didn’t have glasses on so I couldn’t really see how focused it was.

This is not a soundtrack I added later, it just happened to be what was playing on my bike stereo when I saw the deer, I thought it worked out well…

The last one turned around and went back (after already crossing the road), I’m not sure why he got spooked when the others didn’t. I went over to the side of the road and sat down for a bit, but never saw any appear on either side of the road again.

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Great day outside on Hines Drive today. Lots of great colors as fall approaches. Here’s a panorama I took with my iPhone (and stitched it on my iPhone with AutoStitch on the phone too!).

I think it took eight or nine images to build the whole thing and it came out to 4000×506 pixels. This program works quick: I took the photos with the camera app, ran the AutoStich program, clicked the photos, it built a tiny thumbnail, I clicked the stitch button and few minutes later I’ve got the panorama on the screen!

Click to enlarge panoramic image, if it doesn’t load correctly, here’s a 1024 wide image.

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So last Saturday I got a ticket from a Wayne County Sheriff on Hines Drive (for passing a Road Closed sign). I knew they were wrong and of course they didn’t want to listen to me.

On the way to the Helms Haven park area, I drove around a gate that says “Road Closed” but also says “Entrance Only Helms Haven area”, but he just didn’t care to listen about that park. Hines Drive is a huge long road that has a bunch of parks, when they close it on Satudays in the summer (so you can bike ride / walk with no traffic) or for flooding (etc.), they block off the main access road and you’re supposed to drive around it to get to the closest park and then the road is really closed (big barricade).

But he didn’t want to listen to me (I said it politely twice and pointed towards the sign in the distance but he didn’t care) so I went to the courthouse. I printed something from the County Parks site that said that you could go around it for certain events, and sent an e-mail to verify it (which they confirmed) and took that with me along with a few pictures I took (the sign and road layout) and I got it waived. It’s just an annoyance since it was more than a few hours of time to beat a ticket that never should have been written.

I do have to give him a little break, he was probably distracted by the decapitated head they just found….

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So it was a great day today, the forecast kept getting better and better this week and so did the day! I was down at one of the parks on Hines Drive today and the colors were excellent! This photo does not do it justice…

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