Touring the neighborhood

The other day I went for a walk to the park down the street. I am very lucky, because my house has a city park right behind the backyard, and another park just a block away! This is my green space, and it's a great place to go for a walk and get outside.

This time around, I decided to take some pictures to post here, since I'll probably write about going to the park as my main "rambling in nature", when I'm not taking a special trip somewhere else.

Enjoy your tour! We'll start with the park at the end of the street - it's a dead end street, so there are no roads bordering the park, just touching here and there. There's a nice asphalt path going around it.

Turning left...

 I love that there are a lot of trees here, and not just open space.

Heading south

Today we took yet another scenic drive! This time it was just my parents and me. We drove south of St. Louis, down into the St. Francois Mountains - in fact St. Francois State Park was our first stop (after breakfast at Burger King...) This is one of our go-to parks for "getting our nature fix", and we almost always go there to see wildflowers in the spring, and fall colors in the autumn. The fall colors aren't turning out to be as spectacular this year, but there were a lot of individual trees that had some nice color.

We drove around the main road, and through the campground - all the sites were full for a Halloween event that's happening tonight! There were a lot of pumpkins and decorations around - it looked like fun, and it was definitely perfect weather for camping. In fact, it was actually hot out! It felt strange to be wearing shorts outside when a week ago I was wearing my fleece jacket and stocking hat inside the visitor center at Miner's Castle!

We stopped at the picnic area on our way out to check out Coonville Creek, a beautiful little Ozark stream. There's a gravel bar right there, so you can get down to the water.

There are little fish in that pool - minnows, but also some bigger little ones. I tossed bits of gravel in, one at a time, to watch them dart for it to see if it was food. A regular feeding frenzy!

Leaves on the water.

Little frog on the leaves! This is about life size.

Apple Run

Yesterday my parents and sister and I went on our traditional trip out to Calhoun County in Illinois to buy apples. It's as much about the scenic drive as it is about the apples, although they are certainly delicious! We always cross the Mississippi River at Alton and drive upstream along the Great River Road, along the bluffs. We stopped this time at the tiny town of Elsah for a picnic at the little park there, which is by a spring. A family with two little kids got there just after us, so we got to enjoy watching them on the playground!

We drove on past Grafton to Pere Marquette State Park. We didn't have time for a real hike, but we did walk a little ways up the trail near the parking lot. It was nice to get out into the woods, even though we could still hear the traffic just below.

Actually, it took us a few minutes to get past this gorgeous sugar maple near the parking lot!

  

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I realize I've gotten behind in posting. That's partly because I stopped having internet access at the house about a month ago, but I do have a lot I want to catch up on! Here's a brief overview, though: I have finished my time at Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore. I just returned home to St. Louis, and in the last two and a half days have gotten almost nothing unpacked! I will be working on all that, but also on catching up here. I have a number of posts written out in a notebook, that I just need to type up, and a lot of photos to sort through. I plan to get all the posts ready, then put them up all at once, backdated to when I wrote them, with a note at the top telling what's new.

Oscar comes to visit

Today we had an unusual sight at Miner's Castle. The Oscar Meyer Wienermobile showed up!

I didn't realize it at first. A man and woman came in wearing shirts with the hot dog logo on them, but I didn't make the connection until I overheard a family outside. The parents were telling their little boy, who was about 4 years old, "Look, there's a car that's shaped like a hot dog!" "Where?" "Right over there, see?" "I don't see a hot dog..."

A few minutes later the man came in and asked if I had a phone he could use - because his vehicle wouldn't start! I saw he had a cell phone and suggested he try walking around the overlook area to see if he could get any service further out, and if he couldn't get through I would use the radio to call out for assistance. While he was out doing that, I talked with another couple who had come in, and told them what was going on. They had jumper cables in their truck so went out to offer to help jump-start the Wienermobile.

As they all walked out to the parking lot, I suddenly realized I needed to get a picture of all this! I didn't want to lock up just for that, but I walked out in front of the visitor center and zoomed in.

For about the past fifteen minutes, I had been hearing a faint shrill noise off in the distance. Some kid playing with an emergency whistle, I thought - it's happened once or twice before. But no. When I went outside, that same little boy was blowing full blast on his brand new Oscar Meyer Weenie Whistle! As she passed him, the woman called out to him to "get it all out before you get in the car! It won't work once you're in the car!" (I suspect it got confiscated before he got in the car...)

Happily, they got the Wienermobile started without having to break out the jumper cables. (Something about starting it in neutral instead of park - I don't know.) Then more people were arriving so I had to go back inside and miss the triumphal exit of the biggest hot dog ever to be seen at the Miner's Castle picnic area!

Another storm at the castle

Yesterday we had some amazing weather. It was amazingly cold, and amazingly windy - which, of course, added to the cold. It was not sunny at all except for a few glimpses of sunshine late in the afternoon. However, it also wasn't raining - it was just cloudy, and freakin' cold out! It was the first time all summer that the visitor center has felt warm inside when I got there in the morning - usually it gets cold during the night and that cold sticks around. This time it was much colder outside than it had been during the night.

Marc and I were both working yesterday. (I've been working solo a lot while he covers at the other visitor centers.) So we had to keep taking turns going outside vs. staying inside hunkered over the space heater behind the counter.

The first time I went out, I mostly stood at the upper overlook and talked with people as they came out. The waves were really big, and kept coming in really hard, crashing against the side of the cliffs. It was very noisy! A spectacular show for those who braved the cold to see it! The wind coming off the lake and up the cliffs was incredibly powerful - I almost lost my hat.

When I went out later I brought my camera with me. I spent a long time at the upper overlook again, talking with visitors and taking my own photos and videos in between. Then I headed down to the lower overlook. If I had to be outside in the cold, I might as well get the full view!

Down there the waves were even louder, with a big boom every so often as one hit the rocks at just the right angle. There were big white-caps as far out on the lake as you could see, and the wind was blowing just as hard as ever. With the waves and the wind, it felt like I was shouting to be heard! People kept on coming to the overlook, so I stayed down there for quite a while.

Maybe for too long, because I never could get warm again after that - even when I was practically sitting on top of the space heater, still wearing both my sweater and my fleece jacket. When I got home I took a nap, and even in the warm house, wearing sweats, under a blanket, I was still cold. I finally felt okay after having hot chicken and rice and a big mug of hot chocolate with coffee in it.

Getting back on again...

Today I finally went on a bike ride! I just rode down Sand Point Road toward the main road and back, but it came out to just over 5.6 miles - not bad considering I've had no practice in ages, and every time I've tried the bike has turned out to need repairs before I've gotten anywhere! (Actually, there was a funny sort of creaking in the wheel - but I'm not going to worry about that at this point...)

It was a beautiful day - not warm, but sunny for most of the afternoon. I took some pictures of the trees around the Miner's Castle visitor center, which are just starting to show a few bits of color around the edges. More "before" to precede an "after" later!