Pictures from my walk area

I've been having lot of trouble getting Blogger to show me the buttons I need to attach pictures to my messages. And when it did show the buttons, when it allowed me to attach a picture, it corrupted the picture and the message. I'm trying this from a Macintosh running Firefox with many less restrictions on web pages (because this Mac is safer than a Windows machine). So, the problem is probably not with Blogger but with the restrictions I've been forced to put on web pages through the browser. Enough complaining here is the post I've been wanting to enter.

I promised to post some pictures from the area of my lunch time walks. I'm still walking after about two weeks but of course that doesn't mean much. To do myself any good, I need to keep this up for at least three months. Then keep going! I got a new camera just as I was starting to walk again and I plan to take it with me on the walks. I hope that will be an added motivating factor to keep me going. This first one reminds my of the Robert Frost poem, "The Road Not Taken". You can see that spring has NOT hit us here yet. The only green are the pine trees. These two paths seem to head off in completely different directions but you can actually get from one to the other about ten minutes down either path. So, I've been making a loop by going down one of the paths and coming back on the other. That gives me about a half hour walk.

As you can , perhaps, see from this picture, we share these woods with dirt bikes and all-terrain vehicles. While they help by keeping the path open, they do cause a lot of damage to the path when it rains. These ruts make it difficult to walk, sometimes, and collect water when it rains. I noticed someone dragged a dead tree across the path trying to keep the bikes and ATVs away but they just treat that as a challenge and are probably happy that it was done. The smashed pieces of the tree are still across the path adding "excitement" to an otherwise easy ride for the motorized folks.

There aren't any great views n this walk because it is pretty flat. It would be nice if there was a hill along the way that you could look out and see a larger area. But there just aren't any hills here. I grew up in Western Pennsylvania where there is no "flat". You're either on a hill or in a valley. That has its pluses and minuses. My wife jokes about all the cemeteries there being on a hill where it is hard to walk to the grave sites or to stand as you look at the stones. I tell here that hills are all they have there. The only way to have a flat place is to dig the top top off a hill.

Here was a pleasant surprise on my of my walks. I haven't been seeing butterflies as much as I remember when I was younger. It seemed like you'd see hundreds of butterflies in a day but now you're lucky to see one a week. Well, this day I saw five or six of the same species (what ever this is). I thought I kept seeing the same one and that it was following me. Then I saw two of them together and then three. My new camera has a really nice zoom lens that can go to the 35 mm equivalent of about 420 mm (12x) so I was able to get this picture from about ten or twelve feet away. I will talk more about this great camera in another post.

Here is the largest "hill" I have to deal with on my walks. You can see more ruts, too. I'll bet the bikers like this part. They get to slip and slide and test their abilities when it is wet here. It tests my abilities, too, when it is wet and muddy. I've had some close calls going up and down this section. I did some volunteer work maintaining trails at one time and I'm tempted to try what I learned there on this section. But there just isn't enough time. And I'd probably just get it fixed and it would rain and the bikes and ATVs would rip it up again. I may be neurotic but I'm not a masochist! I'll just leave it as it is. Maybe it will get so bad that the motorized folks will leave and go somewhere else. There have been dirt bikes back here for years, though, and I don't remember seeing the paths this beat up before. Maybe it is just some new people who are doing all the damage. Maybe they'll move away and leave our paths alone.

I was going to show some pictures from another section of the woods that I used to walk but that other path is completely gone. There is a lot of construction there now. Here is a picture of that. It looks like they are carrying away a lot of the dirt and rock. The machine in the middle of the picture (you can only see the top of it here) is separating the dirt from the gravel and the rock with three conveyor belts that make three piles - one for dirt, one for gravel and one for rocks. This area is becoming a larger and larger industrial park. It doesn't look like many of the spaces have been sold yet but they are digging again so I guess they think they will be selling more.

For my final picture, I've got a picture of , what someone has told me, is a Turkey Buzzard (or Turkey Vulture). I've only seen them soaring so I've never seen one resting to really see its head or see the upper side. I've only seen the bottom. Last year I only saw one or two but this year I see at least four of them. I don't know if we're seeing the young of the older pair or new birds are moving in. They look so graceful. They rarely flap their wings. They like soaring over our parking lot to get the heated, rising air to give them lift. I used to think they were watching me when I started to walk in previous attempts to exercise regularly. I was moving so slowly at that time that they may have thought they'd soon have a meal.