Instead, I joined the second expedition out the door to hike, well more of an educational walk, around the Bane Berry Nature Loop and the Independent and Blue Ridge mines. (I still don't know what they mined.) I kept wondering what the red berries were, then we came upon a nature sign that told us. They were Bane Berries. We don't know whether the white ones were an albino mutation, a different stage of the same berry, or a snow berry.
After a lunch of tomato and mustard sandwiches, we headed off to Lake Walton for canoeing (and swimming). My daughter "guilted" me into swimming across the lake, if you can call what I did swimming. It was at least 200 yards regardless of the real distance because I definitely didn't go straight across. I was a little concerned with the circling buzzards. Once we got across, the sag canoe came by and got us back to the starting side.We also saw a number of tanker planes over flying us to drop their loads on at least one of the three fires in the area.
My daughter drove one of the cars back and missed the turn that would have taken us back to the paved road. This led to a back road adventure that didn't involve paving. We obviously made it.
Dinner was my daughter, son-in-law, and my turn. They supplied a great Caribbean Black Bean soup with all kinds of fresh toppings. I supplied the baked goods: the "Almost No Knead" bread, chocolate cupcakes, vanilla cupcakes, and cupcake toppings (raspberries, peaches, chocolate granache, and fluffy buttercream frosting). I'm eating too well in this Life after Layoff.
Almost all of us took a walk in the well moon lit dark after dinner to see if we could see the glow of any of the fires. We couldn't see a glow but could definitely see the ash falling like a light snow and smell the smoke.
No comments:
Post a Comment