First Boat Ride in Our Boat of 2024

 

Today I worked from home in the morning, and I went to another very productive meeting. If this keeps up, I won't hate meetings anymore! I have another one tomorrow, so we'll see how that goes... As soon as I got off of work, our neighbor who took me sailing on Sunday helped Travalon and me to get our boat on the water. We took a ride back into the marsh, and it is surprisingly clear of lotuses, so the weed-clearing boats I saw some weeks ago must have gone back there. I know this is very late to get our boat in the water - the sun is already in Virgo - but it's technically still summer, and some of our best boating has been in October, so there's plenty of time for some great boat rides. It's just that we kept having problems, first with the plug not fitting and then with the trailer hitch, but everything's working right now. We saw a couple of belted kingfishers, or maybe the same one twice, and lots of mallards. Sorry, no photos from our boat ride.

Then we took a hike on trails alongside the marsh, looking at the same scene from the land that we had just seen from the boat. We saw this cute bench.

Travalon had not brought his good camera, but he took some photos of the lotuses with his phone.

They smelled really good. There was a ton of goldenrod blooming, and it had a pleasant scent as well. We also saw these cute purple flowers, which my phone says are speedwell but I'm not totally convinced.

Tomorrow I am working on campus again, then my colleague, her coworker, Travalon, and I will try to get a free boat ride on the Alumni Association pontoon like we did last week. I thought tomorrow was the last day, even though last year it went until mid-September, but sure enough, they sent an email saying now the boat rides are going until the 13th, so hopefully there will not be a big rush of people tomorrow thinking it's their last chance. I'll let my readers know how it goes.

Famous Hat