Snowflakes in April

Don't be fooled by the pictures. They were taken last year. So, yes, you read the title correctly. We have had snow twice this week. The flurries are sporadic, so there may have been more snow that I just didn't see. With the wind as strong as it is, the weather is so bitterly cold that I don't even care about saving my lettuce. I just want to stay inside. I look at photos like these two to help my attitude about the weather.

I thought I was pretty clever to plant lettuce. Meg, a home school gal I know, had lettuce in Feb. one year, if I remember right. I thought I ought to try to do the same. But alas, the weather is not cooperating. Everything was alive and well yesterday, getting a second set of leaves even.

Since the weather is so cold, I have no motivation to find geocaches. Instead, I am working on puzzle caches. Solving puzzles to help me find the coordinates of a cache seems like a good substitute right now. I think my previously frost bitten ears would protest if I went out with my gps receiver in the forest right now.

On another note, I have researched Margo Frankel Woods State Park. I have found very little information online on it, except that one man has a brochure for a self-guided tour for the park, and it seems to be unavailable to the public. Margo Frankel Woods is state park, yet run by the township in which it is located. We are big fans of the park on the east side of the highway. My nephew, older daughter, and I found a geocache, Billy Goat's Bluff, GCNDGP, there. Last year, at about this time, a month before we found the geocache, we decided to search for morels. We didn't find any, but we did find bloodroot (the kids had to test it by pulling out a root), bluebells (see photo), spring beauty, trout lily, phlox (Grandma called it Sweet Williams), a northern leopard frog (can you see it in the photo?), all the early spring time things, and one man who was very, very lost. We weren't much help to him. My grandpa laughed when we came back from our hike -- wet and muddy from the rain.

I remember that my mother always said that the west side of the park, west of the highway, was the better for horseback riding, especially along the creek. I really want to explore this part of the park. I have never been there. She thought that side of the park was probably as large as her lot and my sister's. mapquest is showing it to be quite a bit larger than that. My dad tells me that the only parking area would be the shoulder on the highway, thus it is less developed than the east part of the park. Sounds perfect to me.