Evening at Lake Shabonna

Just wrapped up a pretty excellent evening at Lake Shabonna in southern DeKalb County. The afternoon began with a Chicago Cubs thriller ending in a come back win for the good guys. After that, sunny skies, temperatures in the 80's and nothing on the agenda meant only one thing. I needed to get out of the house. Tia and I had planned on heading to Lake Shabonna together to explore the area. She got stuck with a group project for the remainder of the week so I had to solo it. It was the first time since discovering the place that I was able to actually get out and look around, so I decided to follow one of the trails. It turned out to be pretty epic! I began walking around 5:30, and didn't return to my car until dark and I didn't even walk the entire thing.

I managed to see countless deer, a raccoon, a skunk, a snake, five beavers (one of which being incredibly cliche' and chewing on some wood as it swam along with the others) and a ton of hawks. And swarms of those annoying little gnat type things that just fly furiously in compact swarms, and apparently follow people around. They'd latch on and just fly in a pack right above my head. Perhaps my friend Google can help me out... be right back. Eh, some kind of gnat. But you walk under one of their swarms and they literally follow you. I had several packs latch on to me and had to sprint to leave them behind.

By dusk I returned to my car and drove to a new spot to setup for star trails. I spent about an hour out there but bumped the camera midway thru so the trails aren't nearly as long as I had hoped.

I'm suddenly not in the mood to write. I'll likely try and head back out tomorrow evening as I'm fairly free again. This has actually been a pretty docile end to the semester for once. I'm fairly free until actual finals week arrives, which will be the first week of May.

My sensor needs cleaned, and I didn't notice I had dried on raindrops from the lightning expedition last week that helped screw with a couple photos.

Flickr if you want to avoid blogger compression:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/prairiestormmedia/sets/72157623858213536/




Here's mister little garter snake. Going to get flattened if he isn't careful, but I'm sure that warm pavement felt awesome.