This weekend, I visited Illinois and Iowa for my college roommate’s wedding. Fresh off my Ireland trip, I flew to Chicago, IL on Thursday to meet another friend, drove with her 4 hours on Friday to Cedar Rapids, IA (plus another 1.5 hours north later on for the rehearsal dinner!), attended the wedding on Saturday, drove back to Chicago on Sunday, and flew back to Seattle late-ish Sunday night.
And oh yes, I also hiked.
The wedding was late Saturday afternoon, so my Chicago friend and I had time to visit the Indian Creek Nature Center and hike portions of the Sac and Fox Trail, the Floodplain Trail, the Woodland Trail, and the Prairie Trail. All that earned me a whopping 4 miles. :-) In my defense, it was 85+, humid, and we slept in, so we only had about 1.5 hours before we needed to be back to the hotel to freshen up for the wedding.
I grew up in Virginia and the smell of the Iowa woods reminds me a lot of my childhood, rather than my adulthood which has been spent primarily in the Northwest. The trails wound through both forest and prairie. . .and it was the prairie grass where we were frightened by a fawn.
My friend and I hadn’t been talking for a while, just enjoying the comfortable silence and the scenery when all of a sudden we heard loud thrashing in the grass seemingly right next to us. We gasp and freeze and about 10 feet behind us, a fawn, still with spots(!), hops out into the trail. I’m not sure whose eyes were bigger as we turned to stare at each other – the baby deer’s or ours. All of us stood still for a moment more before we turned and headed into opposite directions.
Thank goodness it was only a deer. . .
:-)
Jaime
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