January 05th, 2021

The weather this past Saturday was gorgeous. No wait, what's better than gorgeous? Sublime :)  Sublime. That's it. The weather was sublime.  Not too hot, not too cold, not too humid, not too dry.  A teensy little breeze, blue skies and a few big puffy clouds.  Much too nice to be inside.

We had both slept late which is always a treat, then had a lazy breakfast.  It was one of those rare days where we had no errands to run, no obligations to fulfill, no place we had to be at any specific time.  There were no holidays or birthdays or anniversaries immediately ahead of us to be cognizant of so, for a change, there was no pressure of time, committment or responsibility .  Honestly, it was a beautiful thing.

The only question was, what shall we do with this beautiful day?   After a wee bit of discussion, it turned out that we both felt like hiking but we really wanted to find some place new to us. Some place we've never been.  Tim was on it!  He found a nature trail in a town a wee bit more than a half hour south of us.  All right!  We hopped in the car and headed out.

We've been to and through this particular town many times before.  It's an adorable smallish town right on the water that has a beautiful water front park and an astounding  number of murals.  But we had no idea about this nature trail. Cool! The surprises didn't end there.

We followed the directions easily and pulled right in to a parking space.  The first surprise is that instead of being like most preserves.......kind of off the beaten track.....this one was right in town.  In fact, it's right beside a fire station!  Surprise!  

The next surprise, and a very nice one at that, were the beautiful gardens in front of the trail head.  I have never, ever seen that before.  It was a marvelous thing.  They had nice little benches to sit on, animal shaped topiaries, a butterfly garden, trees, grassy areas and flowers galore!

Eventually I had my fill of the gardens and we moved on to hit the trails.  There were two; the trail proper and the trail extension.  We did both.  I will say this. The trails were nicely cut and maintained, there weren't a lot of people out walking (always a treat) and they had a surprising number of adorable little bridges.

We could hear some birds but didn't see any of them so I have zero bird photos.  And I will blame that on very clever and camera shy birds hiding in the trees and overgrowth.  But I have to take complete blame myself for the missing photos of:  fiddler crabs (there were quite a few), butterflies (there were several), the giant spider or the mysterious and beautifully fragrant flowering shrub that I was hoping to identify later.  I tried to get all of them.  No Bueno.

I did get some interesting foliage shots though so that will have to do:

Oh and Tim captured a lizard for me.  This lizard was so patient.  The entire time I kept trying to bring the shot into focus over and over, he just quietly waited.  Finally out of frustration I handed the camera off to Tim.  Clearly I should have done that earlier.  Tim got the photo and then the  lizard left.  Very kind of them both I thought.

It turned out to not be a particularly long hike, I think I spent more time prowling through the garden before hand than on the actual hike, but still, it we were glad we checked it out.  

We stopped on the way home at my new favourite pizza place Bocca Lupo for take away pizza and wings.   And it wasn't much later that we were stuffing our faces with awesome pizza (veggie for me and carnivore pizza for Tim) while sitting on the sofa in the family room watching TV, and reflecting a little bit on what a great day it was.  

​All in all, it was a great start to a new year!