Last week I ran up to the post office on my way out to Katie’s park. Katie was in the back seat. My camera was on the passenger seat. I dropped off the letters that needed to be mailed and was headed to Katie’s park when I noticed these two having an intense conversation.
Or something.
As usual I had grand plans for Walktober. A place a couple of hours away was calling my name, but also as usual life got in the way and I can’t find a day when I can spend four hours to travel plus a couple hours of exploration.
So that adventure will have to wait for another time.
Meanwhile, it’s not that I haven’t had mini adventures right around here. Katie and I have wandered in plenty of parks this month. Any one of them would be a wonderful Walktober. But she already got to do her Walktober, and I wanted one of my own.
So I’ll share an adventure I recently had with a college friend I haven’t seen in many, many years. Since she retired from her career she’s become interested in birds; she’s joined birding groups online and is learning all kinds of cool things.
She’s seen my posts about the birds out at Kensington, and has never had a bird land on her hand before. She, like so many of you, wanted to experience that for herself. So we met out there on Wednesday.
I get such a kick, every time I take someone new out there, watching their face the first time a little bird lands on their hand. Every single person grins with such a quiet but intense joy.
The little birds weigh next to nothing, they rest so lightly on the fingertips, you’re not sure they stopped there at all. It’s magic.
So, we wandered the trails in the woods, stopping every time we heard the little ones chripping overhead, offering them special treats of peanuts and suet balls and black oilers.
Some of the birds were quite decisive, others took their time to select the perfect morsel.
It was a wonderful walk in the woods, on a beautiful, perfect day. We even saw a bird new to both of us, a juvinile red headed woodpecker! We didn’t get a close look, but we saw him (or her?) flit through the trees several times.
What an extraordinary bird, so beautiful when it flies, with slashes of bright white across the back of it’s wings.
So even though I didn’t get to travel to the far-off park this time, I promise I’ll share it with you when I do. Maybe it will be in November. Maybe it will be in 2022.
It’s nice to have something to look forward to.
Thanks, Robin, for hosting this Walktober for all of us. It was wonderful to get out into the world and enjoy everything that October has to share.
Katie here.
Yes, I know you heard from me quite recently, but mama has been really busy and being a responsible dog, I feel the need to fill the void here on mama’s my blog.
Because mama is so busy it’s pretty easy to make her feel guilty about neglecting me. So I’ve been exploiting using that guilt to get her to take me on walks at several parks.
Having wonderful October weather doesn’t hurt either. I think mama should thank me for getting her outside to enjoy the last bit of warm weather before it starts snowing.
Anyway…last week I got to meet up with my friend Deuce and explore Dinosaur Hill, a park over near where he lives with his mom.
As you can see, somebody had decorated the park, getting it all ready for Halloween which is coming up soon here in the United States.
We had a real nice walk. So nice in fact that we walked all the way around the little park two times! I felt wonderful, and sometimes I even led out front, something that I never did even back when I was a youngster!
Mama was real happy that I was real happy.
I guess I should tell you guys, if you don’t already know, that I have some days when I don’t feel so good. It turns out my kidneys aren’t working at full strength.
A few weeks ago the vet said I had progressed to stage 4 kidney disease and that made mama and daddy very sad. But then last week my numbers were a lot better, so now they feel a little bit better.
I don’t know what’s in my future, but you can be sure I’ll parlay it into more walks!
In fact, a couple days after my Dinosaur Hill adventure mama took me to one of my own parks, Davis Lake Overlook which is right by my house. I call it Katie’s Park II.
It was another beautiful day, kind of windy, but I don’t mind that, wind just makes me more beautiful.
Mama said we were only going to go a little ways down the trail. She didn’t want me going too far because she didn’t want to have to carry me back. Silly mama!
We got to the top of a big hill and mama said we should turn back. I said no way! We argued about that for quite some time.
And then I won and we went down the big hill and up the other side and around to my favorite part of the park. I walked all the way back too, I never once asked mama to pick me up.
So there mama, you don’t have to coddle me! On these bright beautiful fall days I can’t wait to get outside and into the woods!
In fact, mama took me to another of my parks tonight, but I’ll save those pictures for another post.
I figure you’re pretty much overstimulated with all these images of me. Though I have to say, there’s not a bad picture in the bunch. Naturally.
Talk later,
Your Katie-girl, rock star, hiker extraordinaire, and all around glamour girl.
Katie here. Things have been kind of boring in my world lately – as you may have noticed I haven’t gone on any adventures in forever. So this year’s Walktober seemed the perfect opportunity for me to kick it up a notch. Or ten.
So I instructed mama to invite my friend Queen Abby (and her mom) to accompany me on my Walktober adventure. Abby was pretty excited about going on an adventure too. We think alike, Abby and me, mostly by ignoring each other. It works for us.
Anyway, we met at Hudson Mills Metro Park down in Dexter which is near Ann Arbor Michigan. That way neither or our servants moms had to drive too far.
It was a pretty day, though it started out foggy. But I don’t mind that, foggy means cool, and cool is, well cool to us shelties. We wait all year for the temperatures to drop so we can show off our beautiful but heavy coats for everyone to see
But I digress. I’m here to show you all the fall color, right? Hmmmm….down here in lower Michigan there’s isn’t that much color quite yet.
Mama says the Upper Peninsula of Michigan is at peak color right now. She’s not up there. I think she’s sad about that, but she sure wasn’t sad about going on an adventure with me!
Abby and I even put up with all the photos the moms wanted to take. As long as they didn’t want us to sit too close together we were willing.
And we managed to find some color under a couple of trees so that the moms felt like this walk qualified for a Walktober.
We had a wonderful time. The moms were very careful to let us rest as much as we wanted. After all, both I and the Queen are seniors now.
But we walked a good long way too, just real slow. The better to appreciate our adventure, you know.
I think Queen Abby was glad she granted me the playdate so we could go on on a Walktober together.
And I was really glad to share my adventure with her too. But, eventually, we had to leave. We each went back to our waiting carriages.
I don’t think Abby was quite ready to leave. I didn’t want to say goodbye either.
But I was ready for a nap, and slept most of the way home. Except when mama stopped to take pictures of barns. But I forbade her from showing those on my Walktober post!
I swear, that woman has no boundries! But I’ll forgive her, cause I had a stupendously fun day!
Talk later, your adventuring girl Princess Katie.
PS: Thank you to Miss Robin for hosting the Walktober again this year! It got mama to take me to a park, so I owe you!!
No, I’ve never seen them in person. Well. I might have seen a tiny bit of some once, but I’m not sure.
I’ve been watching all the great Northern Light images popping up on Facebook. Many are being shot in northern Michigan, often very near where I used to live a lifetime ago. Sometimes I can tell exactly where the photographer was standing because I’ve stood there myself.
Now days I live far away from the northern reaches of the Upper Peninsulia which would be my first choice of viewing locations. It’s just not practical to jump in the car when conditions are right and drive ten hours on the off chance the dancing lights appear.
But I’m sure, sooner or later, I’ll be in the right place at the right time. In fact I was, kind of, a couple years ago.
These are photos from 2019 when we were in the UP in the fall and northern lights were predicted. Not only predicted among local northern light buffs, but also on national news networks. Everyone knew there should be lights that night.
Which is why we found ourselves on a beach looking out at Lake Superior along with a few thousand of our closest friends, all of whom were enjoying bonfires producing smoke obscuring the sky.
Yep. That’s the closest I ever got to seeing the Northern Lights.
It was a crazy night, and though I was facinated by the others on the beach, mostly Michigan Tech students, we couldn’t see much of anything out over the water. I didn’t even look at these images when we finally made it home from our adventures. We’d seen so many other wonderful things that trip I never thought about these shots at all.
But I have to say…maybe, just maybe I did see some Northern Lights that night. In spite of myself.
Note: These aren’t great images, but to see them at all you’ll probably need to be in a dark room and looking at something larger than your phone.
While camping midway on M-77 in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula last week I decided to explore both ends of that road.
I’d been up at the northern end, which terminates at Grand Marais along the coast of Lake Superior, in June, but it’s such a pretty spot I thought I’d go see what the lake was up to again.
As seems to be usual when I visit, it was a stormy day on Lake Superior. Heavy dark clouds made the sky facinating, but made me dash to the car several times as bands of cold rain swept in.
That didn’t deter the rock pickers and there were even a few beach walkers out there even during the worst of it.
But amazingly, the sun won the weather battle and the sky began to brighten. More people instantly appeared to revel in the beauty that is a beach walk in Grand Marais.
I always enjoy my time on the shores of Lake Superior, and this time I didn’t pick up one single rock! Though that might have been due to the weather and not my willpower.
The next morning I headed south on M-77 down to where it ends at M-2, then a bit west to Manistique. My goal was to visit a spring my husband and a friend had both told me I had to see. But first there was this pretty lighthouse off the shore of Lake Michigan.
Who can resist, right? It was still windy and cold, but this family out there on the rocks was having lots of fun. Four little kids, they reminded me of my family when we were all that young.
But I was really there to see Kitch-iti-kipi.
What is that, you ask? And how do you pronounce it? Well, maybe I better let you read about it first.
It’s a deep, beautiful spring that maintains a 45 F temperature all year around, even in the cold upper Michigan winters. There’s a barge like flotation that runs on a cable out over the top of the spring.
The barge is moved by turning a wheel near the back. Anyone on the barge can turn the wheel and be captain for awhile.
The center of the barge was open so you could see straight down into the water.
The water was so beautiful, it was mesmerizing. Everywhere I looked people were smiling and happy and chatting and exclaiming over how beautiful it all was.
So, that’s what there is to see at the north and south ends of M-77 in the UP. Since you can’t all get there this fall, I figured you wouldn’t mind if I shared.
Hope you’re smiling now too!
Note: You really should look at these images on something bigger than a phone. You’ll smile wider I promise.
Change Is Hard 