A drive in the woods

Is anyone else having problems accessing certain blog posts on WP?

For no reason I can determine, I have to make a concerted effort to find a way in to some, whereas others feed in automatically. Commenting is also problematic.

Email difficulties I was having a few days ago are resolved – sort of. My access was transitioned to Yahoo, although the address remains the same, but I am not thrilled with the new format which is confusing.

WP comments appear in my inbox and I quickly realised that what I was reading often had not come from the person in the headline. Most people’s comments tend to have a recognisable style, so at least it is obvious when they are misattributed!

Additionally, my inbox is very empty. Perhaps it’s that I have simply lost all the spam which would be something to celebrate, however my Gmail is similarly devoid of messages, which I cannot account for.

.

It brings to mind the time I was cut off in Cambodia which was far more serious.

Back then there was no such thing as email back then and the school did not have a telephone either. Even if they had, my parents in Thailand did not, so when the two countries had a diplomatic falling out and the border closed, all communication ceased.

A modern day absence of email is insignificant by comparison!

.

A short drive south took us the Cherry Plain State Park which was closed despite the website’s claim to the contrary. Consequently, we could not get near Black River Pond, instead following the road to see where it took us.

The woods here were quite different to what we have seen elsewhere, though perhaps it was partly that our visit was timed to observe that brief moment when plant life was just erupting.

.

A mere day later we drove through woods again and observed that the canopy had closed in.

Such sudden transformations never cease to amaze me.

.

We had no idea where the road would take us and the GPS connection often drops out, but we have a book of maps and my phone has a compass, so we are never truly lost.

We had hoped we might see some woodland birds and we heard some unfamiliar calls in the trees, but the singers remained hidden.

.

Perhaps if we took a side “road”? (Dirt track)

.

The scenery was very – wild.

An absolute tangle of vegetation.

.

PlantNet identifies this as Beech.

.

It caught the light nicely.

.

While taking those pictures, I noticed a clump of fiddle-heads. Walking in the woods you come across all sorts of interesting things, but apart from having balance issues, I really don’t want to tangle with ticks.

In any case, going into the woods you would soon lose sight of the road and could quite easily get lost. I gave up of such adventures long ago.

.

The only birds we caught sight of were a single thrasher that paused briefly in the road and a couple of large hawks that swooped over too fast to identify, except that they were not the red-tails we are familiar with.

The so-called road was beginning to look fairly dodgy but we believed there was an outlet ahead, so we pressed carefully on.

.

Sure enough, we were soon back on good old route 22 which took us past newly ploughed fields, beneath what had become a moody sky.

.

There’s a lot to be said for moody skies!

.