Out and About

Last Friday my husband and I decided to take the day to do a bit of exploring and, let me tell you, I was absolutely thrilled with that decision. After the last year, it does not take much to thrill me so if you are expecting a post full of real adventures then I am afraid you are doomed to disappointment. However, if you are happy to read about us puttering around an area half an hour from our house then you are in the right place.

We live half an hour from Cleveland in a relatively built-up area but some new friends told us that if we just drove south a little bit we would be in the countryside. So that is what we did. Only a few minutes from our house we were driving down rolling roads and were surrounded by farms. We meandered our way down until we came to River Styx Park. I had looked up parks in the area so we had a general direction to head and somewhere to take a walk because my husband is not a happy man unless he can walk.

It was a pretty, little park with about 1 1/2 miles of trail going through some woods and around a little pond. There were very few people around and the weather was nice and cool for a change. We could hear all the birds in the fields and I saw several that are not common on the east coast so that was interesting. I didn’t bring my camera because I wanted this to be a nice outing with my husband instead of me being constantly focused on photographs so I only have the two or three photos I snapped on my phone. Maybe I should go back with my camera and take up bird photography.

I hadn’t paid any attention to what town the park was in until my husband was looking it up on his phone when we were leaving. He mentioned the town’s name and I suddenly remembered there was a branch of the secondhand bookshop I wrote about here in it. I know that sounds like an unlikely coincidence but I swear I didn’t deliberately edge us in the direction of a bookstore! But, of course, once I knew it was only a few minutes away the end result was obvious.

This branch of the Project Learn bookshops specializes in older books so it was a perfect fit for me. I found a lot of books that I wanted but I restrained myself and only bought four. There is one more branch I have yet to visit and the website says they concentrate on mysteries. Maybe I should find a park nearby and inveigle my husband into another outing. Here are the books I bought. I was very pleased to find a few Virago Modern Classics since I almost never see those.

We ended the day with a stop at an ice cream shop. There are no photos of that because I was way too eager to eat it. We had soft-serve sundaes; hot fudge and caramel for me and strawberry for my husband. It was delicious.

The nice thing about living in a new area is even simple things can feel like we are on vacation since we aren’t familiar with the area. Every outing involves exploration. I like that.