The end of Summer, 2008

This is just a collection of things we did at the end of summer.

John and Katy came to visit! We took them to pick blueberries. Along the rail trail in Dryden we passed an actual horse completing a painting of a horse:
funny horse

The next day we dragged them to the top of Buttermilk Falls park; we often forget how many total steps there are. Here is the pinnacle there:
buttermilk pinnacle

Here is a scenic waterfall along the trail:
buttermilk side waterfall

Later in August it was my friend Steve's birthday. The party was a surprise, so we drove down that morning to Philadelphia to see him at a baseball game. Here he is in the stadium:
Steve

This was my first National League game. It was short, and the Phillies won. The reduced picture quality is because I took the pictures with a cell phone.
Phillies Stadium

We stayed with Kristina's friend Jess, who also lives in Philadelphia. On the way home we went with her to Valley Forge National Historical Park. We went for a nice walk, and stopped in some of the displays:
Valley Forge Cabins

There's a big archway there:
Valley Forge Archway

Some soldiers were being taped re-enacting:
Valley Forge Soldiers
We sat through a brief (and Kristina thought pointless) story-time given by a volunteer about how once upon a time George Washington returned and said hi to an ex-soldier here. The speaker confused us by asking "What high school did you go to?" when we said we were from NY. We always forget to specify upstate-NY, otherwise people assume we mean NYC.

Ahh, our beautiful National Parks. Full of fresh air, and... asbestos? (It turns out that there was an asbestos plant on the site for many years):
Danger Asbestos

Later in the month, we had some beautiful sunsets. Turns out this is because of Kasatochi Volcano erupting in Alaska:
Volcanic Sunset

Kristina's family came to visit. We took them to Treman park in conjunction with the GCF picnic:


Here's me trying to piece together pictures of Lucifer Falls as it's nearly impossible to get it in one shot:
Lucifer Falls



As always we have our deck garden, and as always the Cantaloupe just don't make it. We did get a healthy crop of birdseed that grew accidentally:
Deck Garden

Our GCF friends threw us a baby shower, which was a lot of fun. We got a lot of good gifts, but the most original was a hand-made child-sized lightsaber:
child sized light sabre

And now, the fall weather has returned. Time to pick apples already! Which we ended up doing before the baby arrived, as it was running late.

We went for a walk in Smith Woods which is a mostly old-growth forest near the hospital. It has some impressively big trees:
huge maple tree

Here's our walk, we got lost a few times and there wasn't much signal in the woods:


We also went for a walk at Cornell Plantations. The leaves are just about ready to turn. No pictures, but here's our route:



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