We have new wheels!

This winter we went shopping for a new car, but decided to drive our old one another year instead. In spite of that decision, we still purchased some new wheels this year. Instead of four wheels, we just bought two. Mark got a new bicycle!

His old bike had a bent front rim, the pedal bearings were going out, it no longer liked to shift gears, the brakes were almost non-existent, and it had a nasty habit of throwing the chain. Then he had a blow-out on the front tire on a ride in the park. We were just glad it wasn't the day before when we were five miles away from home. Mark bought a new tire and tube, then realized that $30 would be a nice down payment on a new bike with all the parts working. So Denisa talked him into buying an early birthday present. She can even ride this one, because it doesn't have the tall cross bar. It's a nice smooth ride!

We had to take the new bike out for a spin to the state park down the road. We had wanted to go back one last time to see if we could dig up an ant lion. We had taken pictures last time of these unique conical indentations.

Later, Mark read that this was the lair of the vicious ant lion. So today we did a little digging to see if we could find one. Sure enough, at the base of the cone, we found this guy. Notice the pinchers attached to his head.

Lion is a big name for a tiny insect. We left Mark's thumb nail in the picture just to show that this lion isn't very big.

He didn't like being above ground, and he quickly headed under the sand as soon as he could find enough sand to cover himself. These curious insects are also called "doodle bugs" because of the meandering trail they make while they are cruising above ground to find the perfect place to bury themselves. Their meandering leaves a trail that looks like someone wrote doodles in the sand.

We had heard about the ant lion's plan to grab any ant that stumbled into their "cone of death." We didn't see any action today, so we sped up the process a little by delivering a tiny ant. Sure enough, the lion kicked up sand to keep the ant in the cone, while grabbing the ant's leg with those over-sized pinchers. The pictures of the tiny ant didn't turn out, so we delivered a larger ant. It's still hard to see, but it was interesting to watch this battle. We are obviously fascinated by some pretty weird things.

We took a nice long ride around the park, and then to the National Butterfly Center next door. The weather wasn't optimal for seeing butterflies, so we will have to try that another day. So we loaded the new two wheels back on the bike rack attached to the old four wheels. We finally made a purchase this winter, even though it was a lot smaller than we had planned.