First New Month in a New Land (Sunday, April 1)

Sunday the weather was beautiful. It was sunny and warm and amazing. I packed us a couple sandwiches, one PB and honey on this really good 9-grain-or-something bread that Mike likes and one mild cheddar cheese and cut them in half and wrapped them up and put them in my shoulder bag. That was a really long run-on sentence. But anyway.

Then Mike and I put on our walking shoes and walked. We walked down the big hill, past the grocery store, turned into a residential area and walked about four more blocks to the Sequoia Park Zoo! It's a very tiny, charming, free zoo with amazing scenery of lots of huge trees and trees full of flowers and foliage and of course animals!

On one side of the zoo is a very small garden that resembles Rotary Gardens in Janesville WI or Olbrich Botanical Gardens in Madison WI. Mike says it gets very very beautiful once all the flowers are in bloom. I'm excited about that prospect.

On the other side of the zoo is a park. A Sequoia park.

So, we wandered around the zoo and looked at the animals, and then we sat on a bench next to the flamingos and shared the sandwiches. The flamingos were boring. All they did was sleep. But they were pink. And that is pretty cool. Can you do that? Be pink? I can if I'm embarrassed, maybe.

There were some acrobatic monkeys that were entertaining. But all in all, even though the surroundings are quite spectacular, this zoo does not compare to the Henry Vilas Zoo. Of course, Eureka is a much smaller community than Madison so that makes sense for Madison's free zoo to be bigger and better than Eureka's free zoo...I think.

Once we were done at the zoo we walked to the adjoining park, the Sequoia Tree Park. That's not exactly what it's called. But it's got pathways through the woods and a kids' playground built into giant trees and the best swings ever (there are about EIGHT of them so you are *not* stealing swings from the kids, and they DON'T hurt your butt! Benny would approve of these swings).

We were intending to walk on the pathway through the forest but the forest was full of some kind of nerd convention, which is rude of me to say, but it looked like a bunch of high school aged kids dressed up like they were in a video game, with old-school armor and fake swords (I hope they were fake). At least they were out in real life and not playing video games!

So we decided to stay out of their way and walk through the forest part of the park a different time. We wandered over to the swings and swung (I think that is right) for a while.

After that we decided to walk over to this yummy burger place, called Stars Burgers, since it was Sunday and all, and have some delicious cheeseburgers. They were quite delicious (must. utilize. thesaurus. more. often.), I must say, though next time I'll pass on the fries.

Then we walked back home. We were out walking and exploring and walking and swinging and eating and walking for about three hours or so and it was quite pleasant.

The huge green redwood trees against the bright blue skies were just breath-taking. I swear the trees are greener here than in Wisconsin. But because there are so many evergreens here they don't have FALL like in Wisconsin! No leave-changing, really, or very little! I'm sad about this, but I have a while until I really feel sad about it. Fall was always my favorite time of year in Wisconsin - so beautiful!

Though I do greatly miss everything familiar about Wisconsin, I'm on an ADVENTURE, right!? So I'm exploring the town.

I noticed the population sign driving one day. It says Eureka has 28,000-some people in it. So now that we have that cleared up...