jiggety jig

home again. it's very strange to be indoors. my rooms seem so expansive in comparison with what i've known as "indoors" these days. but now i have a ton of pictures to process, and some video, and i'm going to try to tell you about it.

a little, at least.

if you'll allow me to skip backward, i was down in hoosick falls and all of a sudden i thought: better get up into the adirondacks if i'm going to go to that party.

but i stopped at a few caches along the way and it nearly broke my heart, but practically on op of one of the caches was a small but viable patch of morels. MORELS! do you have any idea how long it's been since i found any of those?

and i had no way really to cook them, because although i am equipped for boiling water, that's about it. if i'd had a traveling companion i might could have improvised a little chowder with some salmon, but not for just me. i had no way to cope with dishes, or leftovers.

so i got out to hoel pond, and there's a snag at the back of my campsite. i know i've been taking pictures of the back of my campsites for you, but hoel pond is just about the prettiest and there are a lot of pictures of it.

second leg

st. john in the wilderness

the snag is wide enough to sit on, so that's where i spend a lot of my time sitting in prayer, or just sitting. it is sweet and good to sit and listen to the water lapping up all around me, and to listen to the loons calling.



periodically of course, i do leave the campsite to go find geocaches and maybe even try to switch sites, but the good sites on other ponds keep being full, and hoel pond keeps being deserted.

saturday afternoon i was so whipped i didn't have the energy to walk a couple hundred feet to find a cache, so i just went back to the campsite, left the tailgate open and facing the pond, and slept for several hours in dappled sunshine. spring breezes. that lightly toasted smell of balsam and sand.

it's hard to get any better than that.

and i was at this cache, called pirate treasure, or pirate loot, or something like that, and very near to the first stage i found some lovely but inedible mushrooms. the containers were an awful lot of fun and i was having a rollicking good time until i lost my glasses out there.

now, see, i wear glasses all the time because i don't see well without them. it is not easy for me to find them if i'm not wearing them, so when i take them off, i habitually put them in the same places so i can find them again.

they're very nearly the color of pine duff anyway, so that was only heartbreak on top of heartbreak.

but i found them.

which is happy, because i knew where my cell phone was, and i know NFA's phone number, so you know who was going to have to come out and find them should all else fail.

i decided to splurge and buy me a meal indoors, at a restaurant, and went to tail o' the pup. i'd been by it dozens and dozens of times and never gone. too cold, too rainy, too touristy...

but it was good. and afterward i smelled strongly of barbecue and had to wash up pretty carefully.






in the morning i went to the caches on the old bloomingdale rail line and THEN went to do "bloomingdale station", which is somewhat of a mistake. it was nice anyway.

remains of the deer

and i headed home.