Running 18 Gettin’ Ready for TCM

Well today was my longest run so far. To keep myself amused, I took my camera along. There’s always something to snap running on the I & M. I started at McKinnley Woods and headed towards Morris.

One spot that was really beautiful a few weeks ago was a patch of lily pads literally covering the canal. This was taken today, and the flowers are gone, but it’s still kind of cool.
Here’s a picture of our faithful runner at around Mile 13.

There are a lot of blue herrons around.

One of the coolest things I saw today was a little turtle that look like tree bark. I’ll ask my homeschooled kids to find out what it is for me while they are one vacation this week. Here are a couple of pictures:

The cool thing is he looks just like tree bark and even has something that looks like moss (not Randy) growing on his back. He also has a long tail. I picked him up and said hello – he’s definitely a real turtle.

The first person who can tell me what this object is gets a free visit from my wife and 2 1/2 kids.

So at this point we still have 12 miles to go or so….

Here’s where they used to keep the mules that towed the barges up the canal.

As usual – here’s the google earth link to my run. Right click and download the file and open it with Google Earth.

Tried some new things today linking to Flickr for some of the photos instead of uploading them directly to the blog. We’ll see how that works.

Another interesting thing that happened today is that I ran in to one of my very good friends from church – Mike Morrisette on my run today. Mike spotted me on his bicycle all 20 miles of my 20 mile run preparing for the Chicago Lakeshore Marathon in 2002. Interesting that we ran into each other on the same run today.

Well that’s it for today. I’m going to hit the couch and what some football – Did I mention the rest of the family is vacationing in wonderful Starkville MS home of the MS State Bulldogs who didn’t do that great yesterday against a tough opponent.