Thursday morning, 4th of July, Sue and I staggered out of bed about 8:15am. We had wanted to get up earlier, but that just didn't happen. But, by about 9:15am we had loaded the kayaks onto my car and were off for an adventure. It was supposed to be hot and humid, in the 90's, and Sue wanted to be on the water.

We found the boat launch area off of Hook Hill Road, the one we had tried unsuccessfully to find last time we had gone out on the Bellamy Reservoir. It's a very shaded spot, and so much cooler than the frying pan area by the French Cross Road bridge.

Sue wanted to explore down to the Rt. 101 bridge, and so we spun to the left after launching. Actually, we arched across the inlet to the other shore where there was shade. The sun was already blaring down onto the water and the humidity was fierce. I'm not a fan of the sun, anyway, and so I was glad to find coolness in the lily pads and dragonflies.

It was a lovely day. We weren't in any hurry, and just casually explored every little part of the shoreline. That's my thing, to just poke around rather than blitz around the place. And that's just fine with Sue. She took almost 70 pictures in the 3 hours we were out there, and about drove me mad with her long investigations of every little river flower and fallen birch tree she could find.

But I do the same thing! Well, without the camera.... But I enjoy just floating into a little cove under the leaf blanket of an overhanging tree and letting the current nudge my kayak along. And I discovered two new things this time. I'm pretty perceptive and usually don't miss much, so I was surprised that as I just floated among the lily pads that I sensed a wonderfully sweet scent. It must have been from the lily pad flowers, but I had never smelled it before.

And the second thing was that as I sat there in the shady part of the lily pads, every now and then one of the lily pads would spurt or something and there would be a loud popping noise. At first I thought it might be a fish or a pond frog coming to the surface. But I dunno about that.... It only seemed to happen in the hot sun, so maybe it was the trapped air under the pad expanding from the heat?

We also found two small islands down toward the Rt. 101 bridge area. One of them appeared to be trees and brush on a rock outcropping, whereas the other was lower to the water with a lot of surrounding grasses and lily pads. We pulled over into a shady spot back up the inlet about half way, and ate the sandwiches we had stopped to get on the way over. Sue had a new cucumber and lime flavored water that I tried, and it was pretty refreshing, though we both felt it would lose some of its appeal in the winter. But definitely something different on a really hot, humid summer day.

Unfortunately, I must really strained my back and neck lugging the kayaks around as by 10:00pm my body ached so badly I couldn't sleep. It was so bad by 1:00am that I couldn't remain in one spot for very long. And so, I spent from then until 9:00am or so wandering around the house, sitting in various positions, getting up and going to another chair or sofa, lying down, only to get up again and rotate somewhere else. I might have got 2 hours of sleep in there. The Tylenol that I had taken just weren't having any effect. Around 8:30am enough time had gone by since my last dose of that so I took 2 Advil. After Sue left for work, I collapsed into bed and really focused on my breathing as the Advil began to loosen the muscles. I moved into different positions and finally felt the vertebrae in my neck slip into place. I did another short meditation set with the intent to let that taper into sleep. I never came to until noon. Whew! I needed that.