Needing Nature

The Midwest can be unpredictable, and this year it seems November was in October and October was in November. I sat on my patio Saturday, two days after Thanksgiving, with the bright sun and 50 degree weather. I savored every minute of it, knowing that we were only a couple days away from COLD. The sun warms my soul, warms me to my core. Honest, there is truly no better feeling. Sun when it's 85 is totally different than sun when it's in the 40's and 50's. It's like having a blanket of heat surround you. I don't think there's ANYTHING I enjoy more than being hugged by the sun like that. When we're blessed with those rare days, I just want to close my eyes and dream the day away. The few clouds that are there, and the chill you get when it covers my beloved sun, remind me that I need to hang on to every moment. Heaven. The laundry will wait, my floors will wait, work will wait, the dishes will wait. When you're given the gift of a warm sunny da

Early morning shot taken from my phone. Unfortunately it doesn't clearly show the moisture rising off the water. I'm sad the leaves are gone and before we know it these branches will be covered with snow and ice. Every time a season nears its close, I regret not having enough time to fully enjoy it. Every time I see something worth capturing, no matter how small, I've been trying to stop right where I am to "seize the moment" before I'm off and running on my day. Two minutes of wonder, two minutes to breathe, two minutes of a sunrise, and then back to reality.

This is the widest point of the Mississippi River, taken from Thomson Causeway COE campground in Illinois. Fall is beautiful here: The small town of Thomson has a great farmers market and down the road there are several flea markets if you like to go "junking." The best part is that the Great River Bike Trail follows the Mississippi River and you can pick it up right from the campground. My son and I had gone for an early morning bike ride once, and we met the nicest lady who was also out biking. Only she had come from CALIFORNIA!!!! She had a pack on her bike and was killing time as she was waiting for a conference in Iowa. She was in her 60's and might I add she was in excellent shape. She explained she had recovered from a rare brain tumor and I think this biking was part of her recovery. I can't imagine having the guts to go alone. I love camping, but we have been in a few secluded spots where I felt sort of "spooked" so I really admire her coura

This was taken behind our campsite at Bay Furnace National Forest Campground, just outside of Pictured Rocks. The water is very shallow so you can go WAY out, and it also made the water temp tolerable and dare I say, warm? We took floats out on the water since it was difficult to walk with the rocks at the bottom. Plus the weather was unseasonably warm while we were there. It was GREAT....not as secluded as Twelve Mile Beach, but still you can go walking to check out the beautiful sunrises and sunsets and not see a soul. Somehow I seem to equate nature with not seeing people!! It's not that I dislike being around others, but when I'm on vacation I want to be with my family and to be able to go off by myself to BREATHE and clear my head. Disney just wouldn't cut it for me.

I almost forgot I actually got a picture of this. This is the eagle that was flying over the beach, and I remember thinking that I couldn't believe how HUGE it was. This one actually came lower but had moved higher by time I got the camera out!!

Of course, since this is Lake Superior, the price to be paid is icy cold water!!! If you're brave enough to swim, after a few minutes, you just become numb to it. The sand here is so soft you sink with each step. making walking across a chore, but well worth the effort to get a good spot in paradise!! Right at the edge of this beach, a bald eagle had a nest and surprised us by swooping along the shore, one of those memorable, unreal moments.

We planned this trip based on similar pictures I had seen on the internet. And you know how it goes, sometimes things don't end up being as nice as you anticipated. We were NOT disappointed. This place is beautiful!!! Like always the pictures don't do justice to the reality. The colors are incredible.....blues, greens, reds, yellows......I've heard it's fabulous in the Fall. When I'm older and retired, I definitely will come up here in September. This is a huge kayaking place, too. There are several outfitters that take groups out along the shore which is where it's most beautiful. Everyone tells you to take the boat tour out of Munising because you need to get out on the water so you can see the beautiful cliffs. We also were advised that the lighting is better on the sunset tour, so we took it 2 years in a row. HUGE. BREATHTAKING. AMAZING. Again, it's yet another place where ANYONE can take great pictures!!! We really love this area. This part

Just when you think you've found the most beautiful, perfect place on the planet, the wind changed. LITERALLY. The shift in the wind blew swarms of flies from the endless dense forests to the beach and oddly anything white or light colored. At this bottom picture, my daughter was saying, "These flies are putting tiny holes in my skin!" Yes, they were biting flies. They swarmed anything that was light colored......like our paradise beach, our dog, our skin.....anything and everything. Got up the next day: More flies. Next day: More flies. We'd wake up and look out on the screen tent, which was WHITE making it a huge fly magnet, and we'd have our own fly forecast. When it was covered at 7 a.m., we knew we were going to have to drive inland for the day and find something else to do. The campground host informed us that he had seen the entire campground emptied as everyone cleared out because of the FLIES. We've camped for years and have experienced a

I thought I'd post some more pictures from the eastern side of Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore. Later I'll post shots from the more popular western side which is beautiful in a different way. The top picture is of Grand Sable Dunes and the others are taken from our campground, which was I think $15 a night. It always amazes me that the most inexpensive campgrounds are the most beautiful. The name of this campground is Twelve Mile Beach, and the beach really does seem endless. You can walk forever and not see a soul. If you want to get away, and just experience nature, and simply BREATHE, this is the place. There's something about being by water that is so relaxing. Lake Superior is breathtaking. I would bring books and notebooks to the beach behind our campsite, planning to read and write but all I ended up doing was soaking in my surroundings. Cell phone coverage: Nonexistent!! I'd walk up a hill and would get a little, but we pretty much had to drive to Gr

This is one of the most beautiful places I've been to. What a surprise to find out we didn't have to travel 1000 miles to find a secluded, quiet, breathtaking place. This was taken from our campsite at Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, right on Lake Superior.

Am I the only one that thinks these are cool??? I know a lot of "naturalists" are opposed to these things, because among other reasons, there's always dead birds at the base of them. I like everything about them, except for the fact that they bring back memories of the Teletubbies . What a clean way to create power, and how cool it is when you're driving miles and miles, and then all of a sudden some of these pop up. They're just so HUGE. We saw "parts" of these being transported on I80 and each windmill propeller takes an entire semi-truck to move.

Gibbon, Nebraska........which is by..........ummm......not much.....which is why I LOVE Gibbon, Nebraska. I just love SPACE, and air that you can breathe and sunsets that last forever, and storms you can see coming from MILES away, and cornfields with the sound of the wind blowing throught the stalks. What's not to like???? I LOVE this state!!!

After the Nebraska interlude, I'm back in Wyoming for this post. Since it's Fall, I was thinking of my summer vacation in the Snowy Range, Medicine Bow National Forest, Wyoming, which is the location of my previous mountain pictures. I've been coming out here since I was a kid, but now things look like they're changing, beyond the "normal" course of change that I'm used to. Beetles are killing many of the forests out west. This picture directly above looks like it's taken in the Fall, but this was actually taken in July and in fact these trees are dying by the thousands. Campgrounds are being closed as the trees are falling, making them unsafe. On the other side of this mountain range, Snowy Range, the damage is widespread, much worse than how it is in this picture. Cleanup efforts at some of the campgrounds show how huge of a mess this is and what an impossible task the attempt is. I know there's a lot of debate about what should and can be d

I guess you could say that the oil well and the power lines ruin the picture, but I kind of like the contrast. Living in a high growth area, driving out here is refreshing, and seems to stay constant.

Everyone makes fun of states where you have stretches where you drive through......."nothing." I absolutely LOVE western Nebraska and eastern Wyoming. I always have. Heading east from IL, you have the rolling hills of Iowa, and then the corn and wheat fields of Nebraska. And then things start to change. You have rolling fields. Endless coal trains in the distance. Plateaus. The land starts to change as you do this slow steady climb. If it wasn't for your gas mileage, you might not even realize that you are indeed ever so slowly increasing in elevation. Would I love it as much without the knowledge of the breathtaking beauty of the mountains that are just beyond the horizon? You can look out and almost imagine the wagon trains heading this same path. Because nothing has changed. Take out the telephone poles and wires, the oil wells, and occasional cell towers, and you'd see what the pioneers saw. Space. Lots of space.

There are places and times where we all become photographers, where we all have an overpowering need to capture the moment, place, and time and preserve it. Some places are just so beautiful that we all are able to be photographers and take beautiful pictures. But it's frustrating when the end result doesn't show the vastness of what we're trying to shoot. So when looking at pictures of places I've never been, I'm always trying to imagine all that I cannot see in the photo, the story behind the story. What went on where the picture ended? What was the temperature, was there a breeze, what did the air smell like, and what was being felt when this was taken? You hear people say over and over that their pictures did not do the location justice. It's true. And when I look at my own pictures, I see so much more, and they tell a story of my memories of that frozen moment in time that only I know. I feel the cool breeze that I felt when I was taking it, breathing

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could learn what it had to teach, and not, when I come to die, discover that I had not lived. Henry David Thoreau