Merrill Creek By Drone

I have just enough time for a quick filler post. I have a few longer posts in the making, but that requires sitting down for more than a minute and a half. Plus I have to prioritize. Sadly, things like taxes, lesson plans, and teaching clinics seem to come before blogging. Boo-hiss. 

Anyway. Two weekends ago, Mike and I were still not 100% after our flu (seriously, I don't think I've been that sick since I was a child). Still, we were both going a little stir crazy in the house. We decided to try to get out a little by driving up to Merrill Creek for a walk. We couldn't even call it a hike, honestly. Mike packed his camera and I packed the drone and we wandered off hoping to see some eagles or snow geese or... something. It was a pretty chilly, windy day, but the fresh air was a nice change. 

About a mile into our walk, Mike and I were both pretty wiped out. We hung out for a minute to see if we could spot the resident eagles. I'd seen one of them on a nearby back road after a lesson the previous week. It had flown very close to my car and landed in a corn field to my right, where it drank majestically from a puddle. Did I have my camera with me that day? No, of course not. 

Sadly, there was no sign of the eagles. It was pretty blustery so I imagine they were nested down somewhere under the cover of dense tree branches. We did see a ton of sea gulls and a handful of geese, but that's about it.

The good news is that I did send the drone up and got some pretty cool shots. With the gusting wind, I wasn't willing to fly around too much (or over the water very far), but the new perspective on one of our favorite places was fun to see. 

More proof that New Jersey is nothing but oil refineries and the turnpike. Stay away. It's hideous here.

Thankfully, both Mike and I are feeling back to our perky, adventurous selves now. We went on a real hike last weekend (more on that later). I'm back to work full time (and then some to make up for the lost income).  Hopefully the blog will pick back up as a direct result. The good (?) news about being sick is that it gave me time to actually catch up on my reading list and your blogs were the highlight of many days in a row for me.

Hoping to go kayaking here this year.

Also hoping to go back with the drone to get footage of the deadwoods.

Our car is in that field to the right (with the tower).

Those two tiny dots are us. The long horizontal line is the huge flight of stairs that have made a few appearances on here over th eyears. How's that for scale?