May 14th, 2021

Wednesday was hiking day which means I am one day late with the photo safari report.  But before I get started on that, I wanted to take a minute to say something I often think, but never take the time to say.  

Every week I look forward to Wednesday.  Partly because I love hiking and I love taking photographs, but mostly because I get to spend time with my sister.  The one person on this planet who I have known the longest.  Although our interests are mostly very different, we have always been very close.  I supported her years of dance, she supported me writing music.  I was happy for her outgoing, extroverted, high energy and she stood behind me preferring to "waste" an entire day sitting alone with my nose in a book.    And still we were always there for each other. 

As adults, we rarely lived geographically near each other, and in fact usually we were many states apart.  And busy with our own lives. So it was a wonderful surprise to find that once we lived in the same state again, all of the years apart fell away, and we could reconnect and still be those two goobers who understand each other in a way that nobody else does because we shared a childhood and a room even though we never so much as shared the same favourite colour or popstar.

So Thank you Joy for Sisters Wednesday.  I look forward to it every week - with or without ice cream.

Now back to our regularly scheduled program.  The Photo Safari Report!

We decided to revisit Deer Prairie Preserve.  We hadn't been back there in a long time and in fact, had never successfully traversed the entire loop due to  high wild hog traffic.  Each time we attempted, at some point we would spy wild hogs and turn around to leave.  Eventually it just dropped out of rotation.  But I'm happy to say that we not only gave it another try, but we did the entire loop and not a single piggie was seen.

I also need to take a moment to thank Tim for installing the AllTrails App on my phone.  This thing is so cool.  All I had to do was type in the name of the preserve and up popped not only a trail map (both primary and secondary trails) but also a little blue dot that indicated exactly where we were on the trail. It saved us for sure !

There we were walking beside a beautiful river and according to the trail map the primary trail turned left.  But, but, but, there was no left turn.  We consulted the map multiple times, we walked up and down the river and saw no left turn.  We saw lilypad flowers, a soft shelled tortoise, a red-winged black bird and some cattails but no left turn.  Dang!

At that point we had already been hiking for about 4 hours and we were 3/4 of the way around a 5+ miles loop.  We were filthy and sweaty and hot and tired. The idea of retracing our steps did not appeal.  In consulting the AllTrail app it appeared that there was a secondary trail nearby.  It took some searching through the underbrush but we found it!  It was narrow and very faint, but it was there. AND it did take us back to our starting point!  Huzzah Huzzah!

You would think that a preserve called, Deer Prairie, would be an actual prairie right?  You would be wrong.  It was all sorts of things.  Wide open, marshy, heavily wooded, and more.  Mostly it was beautiful.

We saw things we expected of course like flowers and butterflies

But also things we didn't expect:

So there you have it. In summary, another great hike.  We will call this one the Deer Prairie Revisited Hike.  Totally worth it.

Thanks for coming along and y'all have a great weekend!