We saw some beautiful country, including this large bit of marshland...
Home to at least one family of Canada geese...
And several Red-winged Blackbirds, like this beautiful guy...
The geese family made their way through last year's dead cattails. The babies were adorable...
Then Kev and I watched the blackbird go postal on the lead goose...
It got very loud between the blackbird and the geese - very loud! We think the geese must have gotten too close to the blackbird's nest. Whatever it was, they finally called a truce. The mom and dad ushered the goslings on through the marsh. The cattails and other growth in the marsh didn't seem to impede their progress; they moved pretty quickly along and away from the blackbird. We enjoyed the bird drama!
We saw a lot of beautiful barns. This one was near the marsh.
Love the stonework. New pole barn on old, old footings...
I was hoping for a cow or two in this beautiful field... wouldn't that have made a great photo?...
More gorgeous stone footings. I love the gray...
Poor old barn...
And not surprising, around the poor old barn, many discarded things, trucks, tractors, parts of tractors, cars...
Yes, that is moss...
There were lilacs growing all along the roadsides, tons of them! And depending upon which side of the road and how much shade, they were in a variety of blossom stages. It smelled wonderful.
I love the old fashioned lilacs...
Our car smelled heavenly...
I don't care what anyone says, wild mustard is a wildflower, not a weed...
Just ask the butterflies...
We stopped at a few garage sales, and I got a rock tumbler (polisher) for a buck. Score! We also stopped at very cool barn sale. A guy had his pole barn tricked out into a total awesome man cave. It had a front porch on which there were tables with stuff for sale (paperbacks - I got 7, he had some good ones, Robert B. Parker, James Lee Burke... score!). The one side of the barn had an open garage door, and from the road we could see all kinds of beer signs & mirrors and neon lighted signs. When we walked in, we could see a long, oak bar - fully stocked (seriously, all kinds of bottles setting in front of a long mirror wall, plus draft beer pulls), and quite a few nice bar stools. Pool table, awesome stained glass light above it, big round wood table, comfy looking wood and padded dark red vinyl chairs, a couple of lighted glass display cabinets with beer steins, shot glasses, trophies, etc. on the shelves. This place was so awesome. It made me wish we were good friends with the old guy and could stay and drink beer and shoot some pool with him. We're going to make our way back there again this summer.
Then somehow we found ourselves in Farwell...
Where it started to rain really hard. So we headed back to Mt. P., called Ryan and Megan and met them for dinner at Bennigan's...
It was so nice to spend some time with them. Megan left early the next morning to head back home to her family in Kansas, and Ryan is by now somewhere around Goshen, Indiana, where he is doing a residency this summer with Justin Rothshank. I'm looking forward to seeing more of both Ryan's and Megan's work, now that they're both graduates with their BFA in ceramics from CMU. Both Ryan and Megan were super generous to me, and I got to purchase several pieces from the 2 of them before they moved away... at what was obviously a "family discount" pricing! I will post photos soon.
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