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| 7:35 |
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| Sunday Afternoon at 5:00 |
It's 7:30 and I have been up for awhile. It's a lonely morning, with a gray, desolate lake, a wife upstairs sleeping, no birds or squirrels to speak of and only the talking heads on MSNBC to keep my company. The skies are gray, the yard green as most of the snow has disappeared. It's 34º, unseasonably warm, but as the week progresses, it gets colder each day, with the weekend of the Mayville Winter Festival and the Viking Club's Polar Bear Plunge, predicted to be 4º. Now that's what I call winter.
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| Another Great Hiking Preserve |
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| Ready For Bear |
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| Snow Covered Woods |
We had a clear idea of our day bright and early, take our time with our coffee, reading the paper and get a few things done, like get the chicken wings ready for later, then get dressed and ready for a hike. It was a beautiful day, a blue, cloudless sky, lots of sun, temperatures in the 30's. We decided to be adventurous and hike an area our neighbors, Barb and Jim Fox, told us about last weekend, the French Creek Preserve in the Clymer area. We knew it was supposedly hard to find so we plugged it into our GPS and found it easily, 18 miles from home. It turned out to be a great hike, through open fields, then woods that skirted high above French Creek for a good part of the way. We made the mistake of going the wrong way on the trail, so all of the markers for the trail were on the other side of the trees, so we constantly had to look back to make sure we were on the trail. It was an easy hike though not very well kept up with lots of dead fall on the trail. But it was well marked if you hiked it the proper way, counter clockwise, by the way. We were out just under an hour and walked about a mile and a half.
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| Evie's Ready For Buckwheat Pancakes At Red's |
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| Enjoying Red's Pancake House |
We had a destination, however, at the end of our walk, something we were looking forward to since Saturday...Red's Pancake House in Sherman. This was probably our sixth time, spanning that past five years and it never gets old. It was surprisingly quiet, perhaps because it was Super Bowl Weekend, but the owner quickly recognized us as did our waitress so we felt right at home. We must have been hungry because both of us felt the pancakes and sausage (from the Lighthouse by the way) were about the best we have ever had. I even had seconds on the buckwheat cakes, made from a mix from New Hope Mills, since 1826. By the time we finished, we were the only patrons left quite different from the usual packed house. We drove home through Sherman, stopped at Mack's Market to pick up a bag of Utz chips for halftime of Super Bowl.
We did not get home till 2:00, so I quickly got out my book and took a quick nap. Evie, however, was busy, making chocolate chip cookies for our grandson, Tyler, at Dartmouth, the only one to not get Valentine cookies. Evie used a new recipe, big soft cookies with lots of chocolate and walnuts, and I could hardly leave them alone they were so good.
Around 6:00, we had our dinner, chipotle/maple flavored chicken wings. By the time we finished them, I was full and did not really want any pizza. At half time, however, we brought out the Utz chips and dip, just to assuage that craving for salt and dip. I cannot say we much enjoyed the Super Bowl (boring and long with too many stupid, infantile commercials) but stuck with it till the end. The second half both of us spent most of the time on our devices, surfing and reading, laughing at the many posts on Facebook making fun of Ted Cruz...better than the game.
I am looking forward to the next few days as winter, snow, and cold weather return.
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