Nature Girl and Boy

This past Thursday Zach and I went on a big, long walk over at the Mormon Hand Cart Trek Park Complex and Sports Field Recreation Area...at least that's what I think it's called. We went on this "hike" as a compromise. It involves walking on a paved path, free of ticks (which is my requirement) through the woods and prairie (Zach's requirement). Truly, we are nothing if not awesome compromisers. And that's really what a relationship is - a series of compromises leading to equality of misery for both parties - right?

So we went on this walk and all told it was 5.5 to 6 miles! Sweet, yes? We were awesome worker-outer people, but don't worry, I'm sure I consumed enough calories this week to keep up my figure (round and puffy).

We forgot the camera because we are super lame, but I am going to insert photos of some of the things we saw anyway. I have a few points that I am especially proud of.

1. I touched 2 snakes! Then I felt a little bit bad because I thought I might be stressing them out. But I only touched them for a second and then we shooed them off the path because the place is crawling with snakes and bikes. And let me tell you a little something about snakes and bikes - they don't mix. Their like Eighth grade girls and boys at a dance. Seriously. Poor bastards. We keep seeing some on the path that are dead and it makes me really sad. So if we snakes on the path we stand like crossing guards waiting until they slither off. I really seem to love them.



This is basically the snakes that we saw and I touched. They are Eastern Garter Snakes apparently. I guess they didn't get the memo that we are in the Midwest.

As we walked for almost 6 miles we played a game for a bit. The alphabet store game. Know it? One person says, "I am going to the store and I am going to by..." and then a food or store item with a letter and then the next person builds on it. It was fun.

We also saw a Walking Stick...in nature. That's awesome in my opinion. I hadn't seen one in real life before. It was cool. We saved it from a jogger. We looked at it and then were walking away, but it was still on the path and this jogger was coming toward it, so I said, "Um...hey, watch out over there because there's a walking stick." And she kind of stopped jogging a bit and sort of looked around and then I walked back and I was like, "See, it's here, it's really neat." And she sort of looked at me like I was a freak, but I thought, whatever, I want the walking stick to continue to live because it's neat. Here's a picture of a walking stick:





And that was Thursday. It was an awesome time. A good walk, good company. Cool animals. I felt really good because we exercised a lot and that was nice. So there you go. It's another awesome tale from my life. Jealous?