It's been awhile...

Hi friends,

Sorry it's been so long since my last post. As some of you probably know, my family relocated to beautiful Hendersonville, TN. While the trip here could be a whole blog entry in itself, I'll spare you the gory details. Suffice it to say, we made it, and I'm the only one who will need therapy.

Now that we're here and settled, we've started exploring our new area. One of the great things about Tennessee is that it's beautiful. The scenery here is amazing. We've learned what grocery stores to go to, where the nearest Sonic is (yes!), and when the best time is to go to the pool.

But you all know that I have to see some trees and water to be happy. And while the complex here has beautiful landscaping and big old trees, I needed to be in the woods. So we traveled to Bledsoe Creek State Park. It was amazing.

On our trip, we saw incredible wildlife everywhere. While we spent lots of time outside in Indiana, I've never seen so many critters so easily. The hiking was great too. Just enough of a challenge to be a good workout, but not so strenuous that it wasn't fun.

One of the coolest things we saw were the baby turtles. They were so cute! The park has an observation deck on the Shoreline Trail, and we saw turtles, a heron, and a great egret. I had never seen the egret before. I love the big water birds, and I could have spent all day watching them. I identified the egret from this website: TN Watchable Wildlife which has a ton of information.

Turtle tracks in the mud. There were a ton of turtles.

Can you find the baby turtle? This was one of about 6 we saw from the observation deck. We also saw an adult turtle too. I couldn't tell what kind they were because of the algae on their shells.



It's hard to see, but there is a Great Blue Heron in the water. He was so graceful.

Here is a picture of the Great Egret. It sounds like a magician's name, right? Such a graceful bird. The picture below is the same bird.

Once we got going on our hike, we saw a ton of other animals. We saw Muscovy ducks, which are fun to look at. They have black and white feathers and red heads. There were several pairs. When we lived in Indiana, there was one lonesome one that lived at Memorial Park. He always got picked on by the other birds. It was nice to see a few happy pairs.

We also got to see deer! Normally, I see deer in fields while I'm riding in the car. These guys were less than 50 feet away! We almost missed seeing them because we couldn't take our eyes away from the beautiful shoreline.

We also saw turkeys, mallards, geese, multiple butterflies and dragonflies (another blog post about dragonflies coming up soon!) and a cute little caterpillar:



Even if we hadn't seen so much wildlife, the scenery alone would have been worth it.

I have to say that my pictures don't do it justice. I really want a good camera to take with us instead of just my cell phone. While I have an excellent camera for a cell phone, it's not the same as a real camera! Hope you enjoyed your virtual trip to TN!