March 04th, 2020

After a two week break because our doggone schedules refused to match up, Joy and I finally got to get back out in the great wild for another Photo Safari!  YAYAYAYAYAY!

For absolutely no reason whatsoever, we struck out for Sleeping Turtle Preserve.  It's one that we don't often do, not because it's a lousy trek, because it's not, it's great.  But because they have no bathroom.  Not so much as a porta-potty.  Dang.    But we felt both brave and slightly dehydrated so off we went.

When we arrived, we were a little mystified when we saw a group of people crossing the road.  There really isn't anything on the other side of the road except a very plain wooden fence.  Right?  I mean that's all we ever noticed. Lots of trees and a fence.  A fence to me indicates private property.  It's not ours, it's not public, it belongs to someone else.  That is what a fence says to me. And we respect that.  And yet, here was an entire group of people crossing the road toward the fence?  Perhaps this need to be checked out further, was our thought.

Once the car was parked and locked and we had ourselves and our equipment all sorted out we decided that we ought to check it out.  If it's just your basic fence, then we know for sure that we don't belong over there and we will just cross the road and come back.  No big deal.

There isn't much traffic way out there. It's just a simple two lane road and as we headed down the other side into the unknown, lo and behold, look at that.  I'll be darned.  There is a trail!  Or at least a series of trails AND a trail map so obviously yes!  We are allowed to be there. What a terrific surprise!  Woohoo!  We love to explore a new trail.  Well new to us at least.

 This wonderful path turned out to be the hike of a zillion dragonflies.  Oh me, oh my they were EVERYWHERE!  Joy was able to capture so many more of them than I, but I managed to get a few of them;

I have no idea why there were so many of them but they were literally everywhere around us the entire hike.  It was incredible. And very cool.

But now that I think about it, there were also lots of birds and butterflies and bees and....well perhaps it was actually the hike of many flying things?

And then we came across this sign.  We were filled with a wee bit of trepidation as we tiptoed through this section.

I don't know if you've ever had the misfortune of being stung by a yellow jacket or not.  Well, I have and let me tell you from personal experience, it freakin' hurts so bad!   Definitely wanted to avoid doing that again.  Yellow jackets to build their nests in the ground and they are mean buggers so believe you me we were super dooper careful where we stepped through this section.  We  greatly appreciated the warning!

The trails were very well marked and well tended. There was dappled shade/sun throughout. It was just so lovely.  And to our surprise, that other group of people that we saw earlier that tipped us to the existence of this set of trails at all?  We saw no sign of them the entire hike.

What we saw instead was beautiful huge trees, pretty flowers, the dragonfly convention, some extremely pretty spider webs and fascinating things down every interesting twist and turn of our path.  

This is most definitely a trail worth repeating!  We actually didn't even do the entire thing.  Around trail marker 18 we decided that we were too thirsty and hungry to continue that particular day. So instead we called it a day, and went out to celebrate with Pizza!  Yum!

But we will absolutely return to hike again on the other, surprising and unexpected side of Sleeping Turtle Preserve.  This time it was the hike of a zillion dragonflies.  I wonder what it will be next time?