Wednesday, August 09, 2017

Go Outside Day, Sit in the Park Day, Watch the Sky Day





Okay. Now we're up to the third day of our Decorah trip, which was a Sunday and just happened to be my actual 52nd birthday.

I heard John get up at around 5:30 am and decided I wasn't that tired and it would be nice to go on a little run too. We were about a half a mile off of the beautiful bike path that goes all around the city, so I though I'd try and run on that for a bit. Boy, was I glad I did.

I caught the sun as it was coming up over the river.


The bike path was just lovely with sculptures and wild flowers...


...And wildlife.



I ended up running 6 miles that morning. That's the most I've run in months.

My shadow self has very long legs.


The best part of my run came when this little guy came out of the corn field for some affection. So far, my birthday trip has been full of cats. yea!


After I got back to the hotel, I took a shower and by the time I got out, John was finally home. He ran the whole trail, 13 miles and said the whole thing was amazing.

We finally dragged the girls out of bed and decided to head to the fish hatchery.


It was really cool there. We bought fish food and fed the trout there. I've been a fish head ever since I worked in the Salmon Restoration Project, but John and the girls had a good time there as well.


After we had lunch, we decided to rent some bikes for the girls and ride around the path John and I ran that morning.


It started out well. John wanted to take them on the prettiest part, which seems to always be the hilliest parts of a trail.


Then Stinky's pedal broke. Luckily, John can work on bikes, so John just put the bad pedal on my bike and switched out my good pedal for hers. Voila! It worked fine.


Of course, neither of the girls have been all that active lately and the hills on the path were a bit too much for them. Stinky felt badly for being so out of shape, because she used to always be so strong. I just told her not to worry about it. If she wants to be stronger, all she has to do is be more active in the future. We headed back to the bike shop to return the bikes and we drank a beer at Pulpit Rock Brewery while we waited until we could check into our AirBnB.


I was really excited to get to our AirBnb because it was a converted caboose. How cool is that!





The place also has a silo for AirBnb and since there wasn't anyone staying there that night, they let us check it out. It was pretty rustic and cool. There are also horses and fresh raspberries and they let you pick all the berries you want. That's my kind of place.

The girls had to take off back home, so we said good bye and figured out our next move.


This was what the interior of the caboose looked like. So nice.


Our AirBnb had many little leaflets of things to do in the area and john found the one for the Seed Savers place and Heritage Farm. I had kept saying I wanted to go there and since they were open, we thought we'd head that way before went back to town to get sushi for dinner.

It was beautiful there.


Of course, I had to get some more seeds for next year, since I don't have enough flowers in my yard, apparently.


We had a nice meal, picked up some beer and made it back to the caboose. They have a nice deck in the back and we wanted to make sure we got to watch the sunset. Of course, since my birthdays seem to always be magical, there were even MORE cats to spoil at the caboose.



 We had a nice talk as we watched the sunset. I got to watch the sun rise and set and hang out with my family and play outside most of the day. I couldn't have asked for a more perfect day. Happy Birthday to me.

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