Lake Pine & Fall

I love Lake Pine walking trail.
It's located right across Highway 64 from Shepherd's Vineyard and our house, so it take me 5 minutes to get there (unless I catch the stoplight wrong).

It's a winding path around a small pretty lake surrounded by trees and populated by Canada geese, a pair of swans and their one offspring, a blue heron, a crane or two, frogs, turtles, and mallards.

I've walked there now for 3 1/2 years, and am on the walkway by 7:30 almost every morning of the week. Once around is 2.2 miles, but I bump it up to 2.4 or 2.6 by adding on an extra side hill walkway--twice, or backtracking here or there and walking a portion twice. Now and then, I do a double loop and make it 4.4 miles; that takes an hour and a half, so I have to allocate time to do that.

I meet the same people every day, and some of us have become walking buddies. We don't know names, but most everybody smiles and says "Good Morning":) Every so often someone will even stop and chit-chat--especially about the swans and their "swanette", or the weather, or someone may ask what music I am listening to (I listen to my iPod), or confide how their garden is doing, etc.:)

Speaking of the "swanette", only one of three swan babies survived this year, and one day in June, he vanished. Oh, many of us were very upset over it's supposed demise! No babies survived last year, and that was sad enough:( I grieved for a week! Then, amazingly, the "swanette" reapppeared!! It was a miracle, I'm telling you! A fellow walker from church told me later that the Apex Park folks had taken him to remove a fish hook he tangled with somehow.
Whew! I knew the swan parents were glad to see their baby---they have worked so hard to protect this offspring!!

Right now it's beginning to look like fall, with the leaves turning colors and fluttering down, and they crunch under my feet as I walk. With the leaves skittering and flitting around, it reminds me of the movie "Little Foot" where the baby dinosauer calls the leaves 'tree stars':) How sweet to walk through the 'tree stars'!

FALL is my favorite time! I LOVE the leaves changing into every kind of red, orange, yellow, or brown imaginable. I LOVE swishing through the leaves.
(I even wait a while to rake my leaves in my yard, while most neighbors are racing to get them off the grass, to the curb and out of sight, quickly!)

I LOVE the humidity gradually dropping:) No more sweaty, sweltering mornings hiking at Lake Pine! No more stuffy, sultry air that makes you feel like you can't put one foot in front of the other one more time:(!

I LOVE the sky in the fall. It's so clear and blue during the day, and the sunset's are brilliant on a clear night:) Then, as a rain lover too, nothing's better than a showery day/night in September or October---it's soothing and calm.

The end of a long, long, dry, hot summer and the promise of invigorating cool walks is in sight:)
Hurray for September lurking around the bend, in fact, just past next week!