Kayaking the Prairie

One of the highlights of the trip home to Florida this year was kayaking on Paynes Prairie. When I lived in Gainesville in the 1980s, Paynes Prairie really was a prairie. But over the last several years, Gainesville has gotten enough rain to turn it back into a wetland, which is apparently its more natural state. Paynes Prairie is the only park I know of where you have a chance of seeing both alligators and bison in one place -- though I've never seen them both on the same day.

Thanksgiving

It was a cold Thanksgiving this year -- we had snow on Thanksgiving eve!


Our first Thanksgiving in our new house -- the combined Hargrave-Cohen clan.



Watching planes take off at Gravelly Point



At Great Falls on the Potomac

Trip to England

We went to England to visit Matt's uncle Martin and his partner Lee.


Martin and Lee in their garden



At the Notting Hill hotel



On our way to meet Lee in Chinatown




At the Notting Hill farmers market

London icons

The Cotswolds

We stayed with Martin and Lee at their friend's cottage in the Cotswolds. We spent time drinking tea in the garden and wandering around the countryside looking at ruins and 1000-year-old churches.

March on Washington

Good Signs

Patuxent River Park

We went canoeing on the Patuxent today. The banks were lined with swamp milkweed and joe pye weed and the butterflies were out in force.

Dog Days of August

Somehow we've managed to see two dog day cicadas molt in the last couple of weeks. They are strangely beautiful when they emerge -- bright green and shiny bronze, with an iredescent blue to their wings. By the next day, they're just brown.

Monarchs

We brought home four monarch caterpillars and successfully raised three to adulthood. The monarch chrysalis is the most beautiful we have ever seen. As our neighbor described it, it's like jade decorated with spots of gold.

Art's surprise party

Shenandoah River

We went canoeing on the Shenandoah River this weekend with Mark, Elaine, Lynette, and Dave, and Aster the greyhound. We saw minks in three different places, a family of four young otters and their mom, and several green, night, and great blue herons. There was a bald eagle that flew past our campsite repeatedly, and a beaver that swam by a couple times. A little further down the river we saw two juvenile bald eagles. Pretty amazing for a river that sees a lot of traffic from drunk college students in innertubes.

Lynette and Dave went birding early one morning and stumbled upon an archaeological dig down a path and across a cow pasture from our campsite. We spent a few hours helping dig, and Mark found a point! At the end of the day we were issued our Passports in Time.

However, our camera batteries ran out a few hours into the trip, so you'll have to take our word for it.