Tuesday, May 19, 2009

A Walk in the Woods

Today, we discovered our love for hiking on our first adventure of the summer!

I have woods behind my house, and they are the same woods that are behind our JCC. I only remember one time that I hiked through them. That was with my parents, siblings, and cousin when I was probably not even ten. It was time for me to explore the woods again.

Jillian and I grabbed our cameras, put on long pants and jackets with hoods so we would be covered up and not get ticks, and we embarked on our adventure.

I had to keep running back in because I forgot things, but I was finally ready, and I found Jillian already taking pictures. She's the tiny white figure at the bottom of the tall tree trunk.


There was no trail, so we tried to walk between and on top of all the leaves and sticks and plants. There was a bit of a clearing where we ran around, but we mostly walked through lots of greenery. Then, we reached a creek. The drop to the water was a few feet in some parts, so we found a place where there was a small hill into the creek. We walked across the rocks and leaped until we reached the other side.


Suddenly, there was a trail, a very wide and well-marked trail. We started running across the trail and passed little makeshift stick sculptures, a bench, a moss-covered tree, and a campfire pit. We easily found the way out of the woods on the other side and greeted civilization.



We walked into the JCC and greeted people we knew (and refilled our water bottles). Then, we were off to the playground that we loved so much in preschool. A large part of it is made out of recycled tires, and it is huge. We ran first to the giant slide atop the castle-like structure.


We played on the dragon.


We went on the "zip line," which was very painful because of the knots on the rope.


We climbed along the obstacle course, the balance beams, the swings made out of tires, the swinging wooden benches, and all of the tall tire structures. Then, we walked along the sidewalk to lots of open fields with tall grass.


We walked along the sidewalk on the road, and decided to walk to our friend's house, who lived in the next neighborhood over. Sadly, she wasn't home, but we left gifts of pretty flowers we picked in front of her house. I remembered that the short woods behind my neighbors' houses were the same woods in the backyards of some of the houses on this street. We walked all the way to the end of the street (a good 15 minutes), and decided upon some random houses. Of course, we could see the houses from my neighborhood and trekked through those very short woods, which had no trail. We were back in my neighborhood. We crossed the street, found my court, and returned home. All in all, it was a very successful, exciting adventure.

Monday, May 18, 2009

Summertime

This summer, I have decided that I am going to go on lots of exploring adventures around my town and around Baltimore City to discovering places and things I haven't yet seen.
It all started when I was finishing up with classes for the semester and I was getting really upset about being away from school for 3 months (yes, I love school so much that I didn't want to leave). I was looking online at some of my favorite craft/art blogs, and I found a link to a list that someone wrote (How to Be an Explorer of the World) that suddenly inspired me. Right then, I started making a list of things I want to do (entitled: Things to Do While Home) and how I want to act during the month at home. The list kept growing every time I procrastinated studying for finals and writing papers.

A small snippet:

Explore the woods with a camera

Balloons at the harbor

Use a lot of COLOR

Explore the world

Dance everywhere

Make friends with strangers

Camp-out

Free hugs

Horseback riding

Learn to use sewing machine

Make skirts and dresses

Pinhole Camera

Paint with a beret amongst lots of people


This will be #8 on the inspirational list: "Document your findings (field notes) in a variety of ways."