Over the weekend, Sandra and I headed back to a familiar spot, Giant City State Park, in the Shawnee Forest of Illinois. From Nashville, the trip is hours shorter than it was from Chicago. Cruising through the trees and along the rolling hills, it really does take you away from the day-to-day routine.
But then there were moments, like leaving the interstate at Exit 4 in Clarksville for lunch and seemingly running into all 100,000 residents of the city on the street. Yes, traffic--and I thought I was escaping the BIG CITY. Yet this was and is travel, encountering the moment even if it isn't as perfect as planned.
Last year, we arrived in mid-June; this time around was the end of May--only a two week difference in the monthly tab of time. Yet, the trip offered its own highlights and left a few others out. Sandra is still writing a memo to the fireflies to tell them to light the night forest when she happens to be in the area, because they were notably few this year. In fact, generally we saw a lot fewer insects on this visit, but the stay did offer some other moments, especially those of a reptilian/amphibian nature.
I captured several of those moments with the camera. Over the course of the upcoming week or more, I intend to post them as images to accompany my words describing the 2011 Giant City trip.
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