Beginning of holiday festivities- or, the walk from hell.

Today (Friday) I had one great idea.  Which is surprising enough, considering the first 5 minutes at work saw me A) forget if I clocked in or not; B) try to give the boss a cover that he had already taken (yep, wrong one, Chris); and C) cut a panel and a half of my first cover before realizing it was the WRONG one.  But my great idea was to have Laurie drop me and the Boofus off at the river when she left for work so we could just sit 'n' relax.  So I loaded the backpack with water, Pepsi, Baby Bels, and chocolate granola bars, and away we went.  Step one, cross the footbridge into the wilds of IPFW...

Here's the first thing we saw while crossing- Mr. Heron.  And he'd re-enter the story shortly.

And the second thing was this duck landing party.  Funny part, each of the ones on shore had swam up till about the point their feet touched, and then took a "flying jump" the last 6 inches to dry land.  The guy in the water?  He found jumping undignified, and just stayed in.

 Ol' dude and Old Yeller fishing on the other side...

Scrappy was much more interested in Baby Bels and snack bars than the pretty waves...

In, fact he whined for quite a while, but when he figured out I was content just sitting there, he finally chilled.  A little.

Nice, sparkly waves.  And swallows dive bombing the crests for bugs.


I was playing around with the camera, and found it had a "pet portrait" setting.  I don't know what it was exactly supposed to do...

...but it got Scrappy to stick his tongue out when I tried it.

I saw this and wondered what it was.  Still don't know, but it isn't a chocolate bar thankfully.

Suddenly a commotion from a distance, and these two herons started chasing each other.  I had just seen the one disappear into the trees a half-mile or so down, and I guess he landed on private property.

This is the one who got outta Dodge whilst the other went back.  If you look under the higher wing, you see that white stringy thing?  Well, yours truly caught him in mid-crap.  Man, can he crap!

Then this big speedboat comes flying by.  Hey, dude, you DO realize there's a dam about a mile ahead, right?

He did, and right past the footbridge, he made an "oh-my-God-we're-gonna-capsize" turn and shut 'er down.  Either he's an experienced boatman who knows how to take his machine to the edge and back, or he's an idiot that got lucky.

He never spilled his mixed drink, so I'm assuming the former.

Scrappy was not impressed.  So we took a walk down the IPFW tree trail.

Now I bash IPFW on a pretty constant basis, because they are idiots.  But they did one thing spectacularly right, and that's the Tree Walk.

"You can say THAT again!"

...except for the curse of art Ft Wayne style.  A metal "fused junk" depiction of what might be a sailing ship and a seagull, leaving lovely streaks of rust down the concrete pillar it rests- er, rusts on.


So we went the length of the Tree Walk- which is a formidable walk, but hey, we got dropped off, right?  And I began ciphering on the best way home.  Because, you see, we were right at the border of canterbury Green, and we had come through there the other direction a long time ago.  I weighed the distance going through CG to the road and then home against all the way back down the road, across the bridge, etc, etc.  And I convinced myself it was about as broad as it was long, and so off through Canterbury we went.

You go through the front, their slogan is "If you lived here, you'd be home".  Come through the back, and it's "Feel the Bern."


Little did I know that I had reverted to 6 AM mode.  As we started our journey, I saw the golf course, and said to myself, "Oh, yeah, we'll have to go around the golf course.  But that's okay, because once we clear it, it's straight north to the road, right?"  About half way around, I also remembered that we'd have to cross the Pierre's (AKA Marketplace of Canterbury) parking lot.  Well, that's still okay... sort of.


Except that I had sorely misjudged just how far it is AROUND the golf course.  AND I sorely miscalculated how much east I needed to travel PAST the golf course to find the right turn to take us to Pierre's back lot.  In the meantime, Scrappy (who was already on my good nerve because he has to try to cut in front of every bicycler), was trying to see how much he needed to wrap me in leash before I was distracted enough to let him walk off into traffic.  So his leash had steadily grown shorter, until...

...not enough to get to the road, not enough to spin me, plenty for me to take good aim at his butt with my foot.


The walk seemed to go on forever, as I desperately hoped to hit the Canterbury border before one or both of us broke down.  But after we saw that what I would have sworn was our gateway ended up a dead end, we sat down, got a drink, and tried to figure out just where in hell we were.  Crossing a couple of yards to a main drag, I finally looked up and saw...

...the backside of Pierre's!  And right behind it, not across the lot, so I figure we somehow managed to chop about a half-mile (maybe a quarter) off our journey by getting lost!  But just as we approached the lot...

...a groundhog cuts across the back of Pierre's and zaps under the fence to Canterbury and over to this dumpster.  I tell Scrappy, "There he goes!"  But he didn't see him.  So I took him to the dumpster...

...where the marmot was watching us from a safe spot.  Scrappy got within about ten feet before he ducked under- and NEVER saw him!

Though he did finally figure out what he was missing.

From there, it was across the back of the bar (where a drunk was about to "offer" Scrappy a drink until I told him Scrappy would indeed drink it), up to the road, and across the St Joe Center bridge and soon home.  And in Scrappy's defense, he did actually see a groundhog on the way home cross about 20 feet in front of us.  And tracked him right to where he disappeared, though where a younger Scrappy would have disjointed my hips trying to chase it, this time it was more like, "Yep, I'll sniff you when I get there, no hurry."   A total from drop off to doorway of just over 3 miles- and just under 2 since I figured it would be shorter this way.  The other way would have been a far less stressful less than a mile and three-quarters.

Magellan I ain't, apparently.