April 08th, 2021

Yesterday Joy and I headed out for a hike with our cameras so you know what that means, right?  Time for the Photo Safari Report!  YAY!

I'm calling this hike the Deja Vu hike.    And to properly explain why, I have to back up a little bit.  Probably more than once.  It's a little complicated to bear with me please.

You may recall that a few weeks ago Tim took a week of staycation and he and I managed a hike nearly every day.  And most of the hikes were places that were new to us. Trails and Parks I had never heard of (or so I thought)  One of them was to a place called Walton Ranch Preserve.  It was a beautiful place, still a working ranch which was unique.  We arbitrarily chose a trail and  headed down a leafy, shady path which, after a short while, opened up into a large sunny area and before us was a simple post and wire fence.  And I stopped short, starred at that fence and said to Tim, " Wierd deja vu.  That fence looks so familiar!"   

As you may recall, Tim and I only did about a mile's worth of this preserve because it was toward the end of the afternoon and we had already hiked a different preserve that day. FYI, the only thing that felt familiar was that fence.

Ok back to yesterday.  Joy saw the blog about Walton's and was favourably impressed with what she read so we decided to hit that for our hike yesterday.  We parked in the same general area.  She chose (with no input from me) the same place to start our hike. And we headed down the same trail. Which, of course, opened into the same sunny spot and fence.  And Joy stopped and said, "This looks so familiar!"

Well that's interesting!  I told how that I had experienced the exact same feeling in the same spot.  But that nothing else seemed familiar.   She agreed and we kept going.  It all seemed new and fun and completely unfamiliar to us.

​Well, I mean,  we still saw some great birds which we've seen before in other places:

And interesting bugs:

Pretty flowers:

While it was delightful, it was mostly things we normally see on the majority of our hikes really. Birds, bugs, flowers, trees. Pretty things, but kind of the usual stuff. 

​  Well there were two unusual things.  As this was a working ranch, we did find cows. Lots and lots of cows.  They were friendly enough, well cared for and the baby cow was such a cutie pie.

The other unusual things were hunting related, we think.  I'm not sure what either of these things is actually called but, we saw 'em so here they are:

So in short, other than the cows and the  (we are guessing here) hunting related stuff, while everything else we were seeing was stuff we've seen before on other hikes,  the only thing that actually seemed familiar was that one dang fence.  And if that isn't the most ridiculous thing you've ever heard, I'm not sure what would be.

UNTIL, we came around a curve in the trail, Joy looked ahead, gasped, grabbed my arm and said, "Oh My God, Sam, there IT is!"

"IT"  being a large log frame in the middle of nothing, just off a curve in the trail about 2 1/2 miles into the preserve.  It looked like this:

The significance of this log frame thingie is that roughly six months ago (maybe longer), while Joy and I were hiking, she asked me if I remembered  that once upon a time, she and I had happened across this big log frame and we got silly and did a little photo shoot in it.  I wrestled through my memory banks a little bit and then found the proper marble.  "Yes" I did remember it I told her.  Then she asked if I remembered where it was. And no I did not.  Neither did she but we both thought it was odd that we had not run across it again.  

We just assumed that it was on a different trail than we regularly hiked in the preserves we generally hiked in.  So we tried to check out different trails in our usual haunts, to no avail.  No log frame to be found.  We began to think,  maybe the frame fell down?  Was torn down?  We imagined it?  It was a mystery that apparently was going to go unsolved. Or so we assumed.

Because Oh My Gosh....here it was!  Exactly as we remembered!  Except neither of us had ANY recollection of having hiked the Walton Ranch Preserve.  No wonder that fence felt familiar!  What a couple of weirdo's!  Our only other visit had to have been 3 or 4 (or more) years ago Somehow the name of the place fell off our radars leaving behind only a fence and the silly photos as memories.

To celebrate we tried to recreate our original photo shoot.  Here is some of it:

What an awesome surprise!   It was definitely the cherry on top of the Sundae for us.  It would have been a terrific photo hike without it, but finally solving that mystery and having such a silly fun good time while doing so, made this absolutely one of the best hikes this year.

Sooooo that's about it I guess.  Two remaining photos for you just because we had such a great time.

Hope you enjoyed it too!