October 14th, 2020

No Hunting eh?  Well that's just fine with us!  The only thing Joy and I hunt is photo ops!  And we found them aplenty yesterday!  Get ready to hear all about it and buckle up because it was a lot of fun!

Our first stop was Curry Creek Preserve.  It was loaded with birds and pretty greenery and beautiful morning light and mist.  Just  absolutely stunning!

And in fact there were so many photos I'm not quite sure how to present them.  Maybe I'll just  start with the early morning light, mist and dew type shots. That ok with you?

There were bunnies and squirrels scampering about and birds at every turn.  They chirp, they chatter, they sing operas. We watched as they flew and glided and soared over head.  Birds hopped around the branches, from limb to limb and tree to tree and every once in awhile they paused just long enough for me to get a photo or two.

Mercy me!  Birds in such abundance that after awhile you say, nah, I've already got a good photo of a Blue Jay today.  Really?  Wow.    But of course there were other things that I got pictures of. Of course!  Here we go with my personal favourite, the miscellaneous file:
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It all seems just idyllic doesn't it?  This pristine, quiet, beautiful place with nothing around but us and the wonders of nature.  Yeah, well, this is where the Stephen King moment came.

I have to begin by explaining that there exists a working farm that runs along one side of this preserve.  We are accustomed to hearing moo-ing and crowing and occasionally the sound of farm machinery off in the distance.  It's no big deal and somehow just adds to the ambiance.

Well there we were pretty farm down the trails when we heard what was absolutely positively no doubt about it the sound of a tractor.  Joy and I both spent some time on our paternal Grandparents farm in Michigan and during my first marriage, I lived on a small working farm in Connecticut.  Suffice it to say that to our ears, the sound of a tractor is unmistakable.  But we were so far down the trails that we were surprised to hear still be able to hear it.  And then we realized that not only was the sound still audible to us, but it was getting louder.  And louder. And louder!  And holy Cats, there it was right behind us on the trails, just about one bend behind us!  Yikes!

What the John Deere was that tractor doing on the preserve trails?  We didn't stick around to ask, we moved a little faster and we thought out loud to one another, ok he was probably just turning around down there, or taking a short cut to a back field.  And then we'd slow down and go back to taking our photos in a more leisurely manner and then chugchugchug, like a dragon, there it would be coming up from behind us once again!  

So we would scurry ahead until we felt out of potential danger once again, only to have the tractor come up behind us again. Relentlessly!  Dang!  Shades of Christine!

Eventually we came to a secondary trail and jumped onto that just to stay out of the way.  You would think that it was would be no big deal.  We could just step off the trial and let him by.  It's just not that easy.  There isn't really room to step off the trail without being either ankle to knee deep in water/muck or waist  high in undergrowth.  And sometimes along the sides was a veritable wall of trees. I suppose another option would be to climb a tree to get out of the way,  but the last time I successfully climbed a tree I believe I was 7 years old. So I'm a little out of practice.  We will leave it that getting out of the way would have been a tricky proposition. Thank goodness for secondary trails!  Whew!  It was an adrenaline moment.

I'm exaggerating about the Stephen King thing.  It wasn't really a fear for our own safety. I'm quite sure that if the driver saw us ahead of him on the trail, he would have stopped and let us move out of the way (I'm not sure how we would have done that but still).  It was more about how the loud tractor scared off a lot of wildlife, squished many of the things I may have wanted to take photos of and made it impossible for us to have a conversation.  Our time at that preserve was clearly over.

We found our way, eventually, back to the entrance and moved on to our next stop.  Which was very close by.  The Pinebrook Nature and Fitness Trails.

These trails are wide and well mowed and throughout the park along the  trails are "fitness stations".  Under normal circumstances, Joy and I would walk right on by those and concentrate on our photo taking.  But were having a silly moment and since nobody was looking, we tried some of them on for size.  We weren't very good at it, but we had some laughs. And that counts too!  After all Laughter is supposedly the best medicine, or so we are told.​  I apologize that the photos of me are teeny tiny.  Joy, kindly, sent them to me and clearly I didn't do something right.  Use your imagination. I'm short but not quite that short.

Anyhoo, we actually did get some real photographs too:

So there you have it. Some pretty photos, the adventure of feeling chased by a giant tractor, a solid workout at the fitness stations and another terrific morning spent together, laughing, talking, hiking and taking photos.