Birding

I really haven't been birding very much lately and what I have been doing has been very abbreviated. That's why it's kind of ridiculous that I just added 3 birds (pretty much the only 3 birds I've seen in the last month) to my life list :)

Tonight I went to the harbor in the morning but I barely had any time so I saw a Goldfinch and a female American redstart (not a bad find), but that's all. So I went back this evening and on a whim stopped towards the front of the park where there's a gate to the back of the golfcourse and there's a little pond that I've seen things in before. I walk about 2 feet into the gate (where I am NOT supposed to be - the gate's usually locked) and see something, bring up my binoculars and there is a Green Heron. SO COOL. There were actually two. The first one shown is the juvenile and the rest of the pictures are of the adult. I don't think I've ever mentioned this, but just FYI what I can see through my binoculars is much closer and clearer than what I photograph. So, the pictures are a little grainy because I zoomed in digitally on them (and it was dusk, so not really enough light for pictures), but you can see him pretty well. The first pic was taken through the gate and I'm actually waaaaay closer to the juvenile than I was to the adult, but it looks the same distance because I digitally zoomed the adult pics and not the juvenile.

If you look closely, he is looking down his nose at me. They have very odd eyes.

As I'm watching the Green Heron, I look back at the path behind the gate (it's a very wide path) and there's a Chicago Police Car parked there. Ruh roh. I was disappointed because I knew he was going to tell me to get out of the golf course. So I stepped out of the gate and he rolled down the window and asked me what I was looking at. I told him that it was a Green Heron, and he's like "Cool - I've seen some Night Herons in there sometimes". Oh yeah. The cop was a bird enthusiast :) We sat and talked for about ten minutes, I showed him some pictures, and then he let me go back in. Not a bad idea, making friends with the cop that patrols the park, eh? I also made another friend, Maryanne, who is an amateur like me. I let her look through my binoculars and we talked all about the herons and the hedge and stuff. She told me about a spot quite a bit further south where I might see some Yellow or White-Crowned Night Herons, and I walked all the way down there, but they weren't there (although there were some Wood Ducks and some other ducks that I didn't identify). Still working on those.

Part II: I was down in Fishers a few weeks ago and I convinced Mom to go birdwatching with me. Before that little trip, however, we had dinner one night out on her balcony and what do we see up in a nearby tree but a Cedar Waxwing. It was very dark so the picture's kind of terrible, but he was very pretty ;)

So for our trip we went up to Morse Reservoir to a spot where we used to go fishing. At the dam are a TON of Great Blue Herons (around 15), Canadian Geese, and one Least Sandpiper. When we were pulling up I mentioned that I really wanted to see a Belted Kingfisher. I think I thought of it at that moment because the dam spillover is the type of habitat that it would fish in. So, because the Bird Gods apparently grant my every wish...

I saw him fly from the trees and saw his white underwing stripes which looks a lot like a Mockingbird's wings, but I could just tell from his disproportionately large head that it wasn't a Mockingbird. I knew what he was pretty quickly. He caught a fish and sat on the fence trying (for probably 10 minutes) to get it positioned so he could eat it.

Love this shot

I have some really ridiculously good shots of a Least Sandpiper, Sanderling, and Semipalmated Sandpiper from Montrose a few weeks ago too, but I'll post them later.

Photoshop

My friend Anna played around with one of the pictures that I posted from our trips to Venice. It was one of my favorites even though it wasn't that colorful. Well, she brightened it up a bit and now I love it even more! Even though I have more pictures to hang on my walls than I know what to do with, I might blow this one up and frame it :) Thanks Anna!!

"At least I can't fall off the edge of a tunnel!"

Ok, here it is, The Neverending Journey. We decided that we wanted to go to Bern, Switzerland before we went to Italy because it's originally where part of my Mom's family is from. We plan the trip about 1 day before we leave and we find that Switzerland is really, REALLY expensive. So we mull it over, but decide to go anyway. The day or so before we leave Nikki suddenly gets vertigo. Like, hasn't had it in almost 4 years, and then suddenly, just sprouts up. We start out a little later than we probably had wanted to on Thursday, but it should be about a 5 1/2 hour drive to Luzern, Switzerland, which is the first town that we're spending the night in, so we thought we'd be ok and maybe be there by 6pm.

So we start out with Nikki driving because she knows the little roads around Budoia very well and thinks she can do it. As we're driving, the GPS decides that the Autostrada (the largest interstate going east/west across Italy) doesn't exist. It was slightly stressful, but Nikki knew where she was going so it was kind of ok. About two hours in, we start to hit really bad traffic. As we're driving, Nikki kind of explained the rules of the road to me because we figured I'd have to drive at some point. The reasoning being that Mom is a champion baby-entertainer so we didn't want her driving because she was so good at keeping Leah entertained and calm and fed. Leah just gets upset when Nikki is in the back with her (and w/ the vertigo that wasn't going to happen anyway because of the motion sickness) and I am the world's biggest control freak and can't stand to be in the passenger seat when Mom is driving. I believe I am "just like my father" in that regard. We actually realized this when Mom drove us to the Pordenone train station and up to Lake Barcis in the days previous.

So about 3 hours in, we're still about an hour or so outside of Milan and Nikki starts to get sick, and we're stuck in really bad traffic (still) and we pull over to a rest-stop. That was also the moment of Leah's previously mentioned only major meltdown. I start driving, and my understanding was that the third lane was reserved for the crazy drivers, so I stuck to the middle lane mostly. I think I did ok, although I was super freaked out for the first 20 minutes or so. Like SUPER freaked out. Not sure why. The traffic continues as we head north towards Switzerland and we realize that we are WAY behind. After some time, we decide that Leah needs to get out of the car for more than 20 minutes and we stopped at a rest stop that had like a full dinner buffet (I can't remember what they're called) and we hung out for about an hour. The hotel that we were staying at in Luzern closes the front desk at 10pm, but we were only about an hour outside and it was 7ish when we stopped.

Mile for mile, Switzerland has the most expensive roadways in the world because it's mostly bridges and tunnels. But, for the most part, the highways (the A2 was what we were on) are really nice and big, and even though you can see the mountains, you're essentially going along a nice, flat part.

It's getting to be dusk and suddenly traffic comes to a screeching halt. Everyone is getting out of their cars, hanging out on the side of the road, which Nikki says is pretty normal when traffic stops because in Europe, or at least Italy, when traffic stops, it stops for a long time. There was a little exit to our right, but we didn't want to use it, because we didn't want to get lost and we were just about to enter a tunnel, so that road might not have taken us to where we needed to go anyway. But after a while we see an emergency helicopter fly over and land on the other side of the tunnel. And so we wait. And wait. And wait. Now it's starting to look like we're not going to make check-in at the hotel, so Nikki calls her friend who calls the hotel and they agree to stay open late for us (so nice!). I believe the exact phrase was "(pause)...Ok, we will" (except say the "w"s as "v"s, and say it very emphatically). It was very nice of them because the desk clerk's shift actually ends at 10pm so she would've had to stay late.

We're becoming desperate because the helicopter hasn't taken off and it's been like 30 minutes. So I hit the "detour" button on the GPS and, lo and behold, it tells us to take the exit to our right. We figured that since so many people were doing it, that it was a good detour. So the GPS routes it and, yeah, there are some squiggles, but they don't look so bad, right? The route we were supposed to take was the tunnel THROUGH the mountain, so this was the pass. I mean, how bad could it be?

So we take it and we're a little nervously giddy because the first thing we do is take this big sweeping bridge up and over the tunnel and into the mountains. So I'm all nervous because (of course) I get a little weird about heights, and so does Nikki. And so does Mom (um, I think, she didn't seem that nervous to me). We're going up the side of the mountain and it really is the most gorgeous sight I will probably ever see in my life. We are WAY up, so the snow-capped mountains are even with us, and it's just gorgeous. Even before we took the pass I remember thinking to myself that I could brag to my friends that I had driven in the Swiss Alps. Then as we were driving up the side of the mountain I thought "Now I can REALLY tell my friends I drove in the Swiss Alps!" Unfortunately, I'm so freaked out that I can't take my eyes off the road (for good reason) enough to see it much, and it was too dark to take pictures. We're probably going 30 or 40 mph. At one point I see up ahead of us this AWFUL part of the road that has essentially been built out over the edge of the mountain, but is attached to the side of the mountain. So it looks like it's floating on air, and of course our lane was on the outside. Nikki just kept saying to me, "Just look at the road, just look at the road". Which I did with great concentration. So at that point we're still kind of laughing nervously about everything, and I really did think that that kind of thing would be the worst of it.

THEN we hit the fog. Oh, I'm sorry, that's not fog, that is a CLOUD. A big, white, fluffy, wet, DENSE cloud that has descended over the mountain top, and I can't see freaking 15 feet in front of me. So now I'm driving along the edge of a mountain, can't see anything, the road is turning every 100 feet or so, but I can't see the turns coming, the road is wet and a little icy, and there are banks of snow 5 and 6 feet high on either side of us, and my contacts are drying out and things are blurry because we've been driving for 9 hours. That's when it stopped being fun. The road just turned (sometimes hard, sometimes not) constantly, and I'm pretty sure there were not necessarily guard rails in all the places that there should've been. I felt really sorry for Nikki because she was on the side of the car that was closest to the edge. Right when we hit the fog, I pulled over to let the fast cars go by and I thought that was a good thing because then I could follow their tail-lights down the mountain through the cloud, but they were obviously more used to that than I was because they left me behind in like 30 seconds. Never did see them again. I think I was averaging 20 to 30 mph, but sometimes I would go all the way down to 15mph. Edit: Mom says that I need to emphasize how freaky this all was and how scared I was. So here it is: I was so ridiculously freaked out during this drive and I never want to be that scared ever, ever again. Seriously, those roads were insane and I really, really didn't want to drive my one year old niece off the side of a mountain, or, you know, the rest of us.

We went up for a while, maybe another 10 minutes, and then we started the descent. Therefore we thought it would be another 10 minutes until we got out of the clouds, which made us very happy and was something to look forward to. But, I think because the cloud had been moving over the mountain and dropping, it was at least 30 minutes until we got down to clear roads. I have never been that tense for that long in my life. My thighs hurt SO bad. Fortunately Leah was asleep and Nikki knows me so ridiculously well that she knew exactly what to do to help. She was concentrating on the road just as hard as I was (and I was just staring so hard at the center line trying to keep my eyes from looking off the side of the mountain) so I felt like if I missed something she would catch it. And I knew she must've been freaked out, but she didn't show it at all, which also helped. Mom tried to tell me to switch down a gear, which probably would've helped a lot with the pain in my legs because I wouldn't have had to ride the brake so hard, but I was so freaked out at that point that I was scared to take my eyes off the road. I didn't look at the odometer, the rearview mirror or anything but the road. Over the course of that pass I remember feeling this pain migrate slowly through my body - first my back, then my neck, then my arms, then my stomach, then my legs, then my feet and hands. I imagine it was the tension because it eventually went away altogether.

Some of the highlights of that particular part of the trip were when I managed to make it into a tunnel, I said "Oh thank God! A tunnel! At least I can't fall off the edge of a tunnel!" (really, best quote of the trip). Also, on the way down (and we had started to relax a little) traffic suddenly slowed way down because there were a family of Rams in the road. Yes, rams, curly horns and all. There was a dad and a mom and a baby! And we got to see them up close (I think we were 2 cars back from them). Nikki was like "See?! If we hadn't taken the pass, we wouldn't have got to see the baby ram!" I'm still deciding if that was really worth it. I believe also at one point we managed to be in the "turn" part of a switchback at the same time as a tour bus who obviously was not nearly as freaked out by these roads as I was because he was going super fast (or so it seemed). And I remember seeing buses and the like coming at us and trying to figure out how in the world they could make it up on those roads because they were super narrow and winding and just nuts! People would actually pass slower cars in some of the tunnel-type things (they weren't really tunnels, just reinforced parts of the road where there was concrete over your head, but the sides were open - there's a picture further down). It really is kind of a shame that I couldn't relax and enjoy it more because the mountains (when we could see them) were really gorgeous.

So I've attached some pictures of driving and mountains, but those were actually taken on our way home (which also went through lots of mountains, but in broad daylight, and after driving that pass, it just wasn't that big of a deal). The pictures of the mountains are nice, but they're nothing like what we saw off the side of that mountain (one day I'm going to figure out the name of it, I swear!).

So we got to Luzern and to the Hotel about 9:45pm after 10 1/2 hours. Fortunately, there wasn't a lot of traffic IN Luzern otherwise I probably would've lost it. That's partly because the GPS decided after we finished driving the pass and were back on the A2 that we hadn't had enough fun for the day and took us OFF the A2 so we could drive the scenic route (along winding, narrow roads at night) through the valley that we were in. I couldn't get too upset about it though because at least I was down in a valley and not up on a mountain. Also, I'm kind of glad it did because we got to drive through some really adorable towns, but it was just kind of ridiculous at that point. Pretty, but ridiculous.

Of course when we got to the hotel Leah is freaking exhausted and doesn't want to fall asleep and Nikki had to stay up half the night with her. We got up in the morning and had breakfast downstairs and Leah was being fussy so Aunt Chrissi (yes I talk about myself in the third person, what of it?) took her upstairs. Well, the only way I could entertain her was to let her play with my stuff, preferably anything that opened and closed. So Leah played with my makeup and toiletries until Mom and Nana got back. We had LOTS of fun!

Look Daddy! I like makeup! (If you look closely you can see blush on her nose). I think this is her best supermodel pose.

This is our Hotel:
The rest of the pictures are of lots of places around Luzern. It has a big river running through it and we hung out there for about 4 hours or so in the morning. Enjoy!

I figured since I subsisted on a diet of chocolate croissants while I was in Europe that I should take a picture with the Golden Croissant. (that's not what the sign says, I think it says Koch Bakery).

Here's the end result of all that picture-taking: