Today's ride was longer than I've done for a while and the forecast said it would get hot, so I started at 6am, a little after sunrise:
Astronomy sidebar: really the Sun is pretty stationary relative to us, but our spinning makes it appear to cross the sky each day, but why does it rise in the East?
The answer is that the Earth is spinning in some direction, and whatever direction it spins towards, we call that the "East"... because whatever way it spins, that's going to be the direction from which things appear to rise over the horizon... Our planet has the East we're familiar with... a different planet can have a different East...
A little scenery along the way:
Action shots...
Snapshot: 60 miles, starting at 6am and ending at 12:30pm, with 4.5 hours of actual riding:
Braving right into the heat waves :-)