Road Trip: Day 2

Just to review:

Trouble: friendly and playful

Yoda: skittish and hissy

After I helped Sandy hang a new cabinet in her upstairs bathroom, we began the day with a delicious egg bake for breakfast (and more white bread, this time toasted! still with butter! the girls were crazy for it) and then were off for a little shopping. Sandy took us to Mangelsen's, a large scrapbooking and craft supply store that was very fun to browse. Susan searched for specific items for her current scrapbooking projects, and Sandy and the girls and I oohed and awed over all the things that would look so cute in this girl's or that one's bedroom (oohed and awed, not purchased).

Conveniently, Mangelsen's is connected to FarmHouse Café and Bakery, a restaurant renowned for its pies (well, renowned to us, at least; Sandy remembers Mom's having loved the pie there, so we had a special reason to patronize the place). In we went. Abigail and I sat side-by-side and shared our two pieces: Key lime pie and peach pie. Actually, we all passed our desserts around the table to sample the whole shebang. Delicious.

Then we were off to explore Fontenelle Forest, a sylvan section of Omaha preserved by the Fontenelle Nature Association in order to restore the flora and fauna indigenous to the area in an explorable setting for environmental awareness, historical preservation, and natural science education.

It's also an opportunity for self-torture.

Don't get me wrong: it's beautiful, and we have hundreds of photos on our digital camera to prove it. It's a terrific place to explore with numerous well marked hiking trails to choose from, and there are several educational huts set up along the boardwalk trail to increase consciousness of eco-friendly living on this planet. It's just probably a better option for spring, early summer, or early autumn than for the end of July. Both the temperature and the humidity were in the high 90s, and not even the shade of the woods could alleviate the misery of the weather. It was comical, really, to watch everyone trudging along the trails, streams of perspiration tracing paths through our shirts, gradually paying less and less attention to the surroundings as we concentrated instead on finding the most direct route back to the nature center and its air conditioning. But we cooled off easily enough afterward, and we're grateful for the exercise, the scenic exploration, and the plethora of photographs.

Isn't the bison bench cute? It's just outside the entrance to the Fontenelle Forest Nature Center. That's Sandy, Abigail, I, Suzanna, and Hillary.

We're off to explore!

When exploring, Lewis & Clark had to haul their supplies in trunks. Susan opts for the lighter-weight purse. Sakakawea would be envious.

There are the girlies on a wooden bridge wa-a-a-a-ay off in the distance.

Let's just zoom in a little.

And a little more . . . there! That's better: Abigail, Suzanna, and Hillary.

Sylvatic Sandy.

We were not alone in the forest . . .

Okay, okay: so it's a dead tree sticking up through the scum of a fetid pond. But isn't the scum a lovely color?

Once we finally discovered the boardwalk section of the hiking trails, we knew we had to be near the exit! Do you spy signs of fatigue on the faces of Susan, Suzanna, Hillary, Abigail, or Sandy?

One of the educational "eco huts" along the boardwalk. This one demonstrated both how packing crates can be used to create shelter and how physical energy can be converted into electricity (on the other side of it are bikes hooked up to generators; the girls took turns riding them and watching the stationary bikes' wheels power a generator, which lit up some lights). That's Susan, Suzanna, Abigail, Sandy, and Hillary posing.

There's an outlook along the boardwalk that enables one to look out over the Missouri River toward downtown Omaha in the distance. Beautiful.

This whimsical statue sits in the entryway to the nature center. We spied it on the way out.

We did a little grocery shopping afterward at Baker's and then went home to Sandy's for kebabs. She recently bought a spiffy new gas grill, which I broke in with the inaugural grilling. It's a stainless steel beast, and the hundreds-of-degrees grilling occurred in late afternoon on the driveway on the west side of her house . . . astute readers will already have concluded that, on this hottest of days, grilling supper was itself a sizzling (pardon the pun) enterprise. But oh so tasty was the meal.

Since I was already disgustingly sweaty from the day's events anyway, I offered to mow the grass for Sandy after supper. Her lawn is plush and required bagging; and her lot is irregular and required careful surveying as I made swaths to demarcate the boundaries between her yard and her neighbors' lawns. The sun was well on its way down midway through my mowing, but the heat and humidity were going nowhere; so mowing was not only hot and sticky but also required the night vision of an owl. I hope we won't discover, in the morning, that I have left random streaks of unmown grass in her yard! My reward afteward was a hot shower followed by delicious Schwan's ice cream, so all is well. Tomorrow's going to be another busy day: the zoo!

A little late-night yard work.

P.S. Read (here and here) my sister's version of today!