At the right is a poster sent to me today. Sounds like it'll be lots of fun (and good eatin' all day!)

We went for a walk early this morning. It was a gorgeous day and we decided to head off before breakfast - before the road began to thaw out and get muddy. Fred had been out even earlier and took a couple pictures - one was a moon shot you'll see in this group of slides. As we were leaving our driveway, Fred suggested we might want to walk in on the snow banks or into the woods - a favorite thing to do when the snow holds us and we don't need snowshoes - but I wasn't convinced until he showed me. Just below Morgan's, we cut down through the field below the Pupino's.

For a brief moment, as I started down through that field, I remembered what it felt like zipping on crusty snow like that on a toboggan. Or a big piece of cardboard. Fred felt frisky, too - racing down the hill at top speed. I've seen him do that before and watched as the snow gave way and sent him sprawling, but this morning it held and neither of us broke through at all.

When we got to Sandy Beach Road, we just kept going straight out onto the ice. I'm normally not a fan of being on the ice, especially when things are supposed to be thawing, but there was almost no evidence of melting going on. An ice fishing hole was solidly frozen in, and we could see at least two feet down the ice was still solid. In some spots bits of waterfront is showing, but absolutely no water along the shoreline. The brooks were running at a normal rate. That will change in a few days, if this weather keeps up.

Some of the way the ice was free of snow so we followed snowmobile tracks that had roughed up the surface and now frozen, made better traction. We went almost to Walkers, and then I began to get hungry so we turned around headed home. It was a good workout, and we both enjoyed the freedom to go absolutely anywhere on top of either ice or snow - what freedom! Tomorrow we hope to go into the woods. When it's like this and the snow holds us up, we can explore places we don't even try to reach in either deep snow or when the ground is bare.

Anyway, here are the pictures.
Walk on the west side