Flying by the Seat of Our Plans

Laura was sweet and let me swap our workdays and Lucy days for the coming week to better align with my upcoming evening plans (frogging and astrophotography).  That meant that this morning was suddenly my day with Lucy.  I made a quick decision to head to Kinkaid Spillway so that we could get some miles and also go swimming. I was concerned about the potential that it could be very crowded, but hoped that the 72-degree weather this morning would keep people from swimming early.  We hustled out the door and got there ahead of the crowd.  We were the 7th car in either of the two parking lots (there were dozens of cars when we left).  We took a detour along the river and through some woods in an attempt to pick up a bit more distance, spotting this structure along the way. We still don't take Lucy on long hikes in the pack that Julia, Blake, Ivy, and Finn sent us, but we are trying to get her used to it on shorter walks.  This was only about 1 mile, so it was a good opportunity.  She

Age is but a number, and "old" can also be "young" depending on the frame of reference.  Micah and I, a pair of thirty-somethings, traveled to the Cache River to see some "young" trees cast against the "old" Milky Way galaxy and it was a mystical trip. We had managed to get out to Kinkaid Spillway and Little Cedar Spillway  in May during the new moon, when the Milky Way is most visible, but most nights during that week were cloudy.  We were hoping to get out once more, so I did some planning and found a few nights where the roughly half-moon would set early enough to give us a few hours of dark.  Early in our summer Milky Way planning back in April, Micah had the great idea to shoot from the Lower Cache Access on Perks Access Road, which faces southward, and therefore works well for seeing the Milky Way core.   I, of course, always make things more complicated.  I was thinking about trying to take a picture of the state champion bald cypress tre