hopyards and hooligans. okay, so no hooligans in this post but I liked the way it sounded with hopyards.

We decided to take this little scalawag...
...Out for a nice long hike today. We settled upon Devil's Hopyard State Park in nearby East Haddam and don't let the name fool you: we saw absolutely no sign of the devil.

And if I knew what, exactly, a hopyard is I could tell you if we saw any sign of one. But honestly, I have no idea. We could have been walking on a hopyard the whole time, Strider could have even relieved himself on the hopyard, and we wouldn't have known it.

Hopefully Strider did not relieve himself on a hopyard--especially the devil's own personal hopyard. I wouldn't want to make an enemy of him by messing up his hopyard, if you know what I mean.

Anyway, I can tell you that we saw this.
And walked over a nice covered bridge.
There were also plenty of fallen logs like the one my mom is sitting on comfortably here.
Some were right on the trail, too, and Strider was quite a little champion as he scrambled over each one. He'd get his two front paws over the hump and then scratch and heave and push with his back paws until his little rump would disappear over the tree.

It was then that my mom decided that maybe he didn't need quite so much help getting up into the passenger seat of her car anymore. That was Strider's problem; now that we saw he could do it, we expected him to do it every time.

Let that be a lesson for us all. You might not want to divulge an ability to someone who has a say in your life unless you're ready to be expected to do it all the time. I still let Drew think that I have absolutely no idea how to change the kitty litter.

And it works like a charm.

Ahem.

Please excuse the state of my hair. On impulse, and at the five minute call before my show the other night, I grabbed a pair of scissors and just snipped away at my bangs...
As you can see, not every impulse should be followed. Especially when it involves scissors and a five minute call till show time.

As we were driving out of the park, we were quite relieved to have an almost full tank of gas since this was the only station we saw for a while.
Yeah, good luck if you run out of gas on your way out of Devil's Hopyard State Park.

And we were lucky enough to drive by Lake Hayward on our way back to Hartford.
Gorgeous. Blue. Tranquil.

I really love New England, folks.