Today, I took a hike up Crowders Mountain in North Carolina with my daughter Mya.  The mountain is about 20 minutes from our house by car, and we drove over there around 11 and a morning or so. When I say "hike" I'm using that term relatively loosely. It's basically a steep gravel road up the mountain that we took today. There are some trails of the mountain as well, but Mya is a wobbly and I don't want to take her up a few of the paths that are a little bit more dangerous.

There's hardly anything dangerous about the roads, even when Mya wrote on my shoulders for a good part of the trip up the mountain and down the mountain. :-)

A couple of these pictures include Mya and I at the top of the mountain where there are a number of satellite and radio antennas. I was trying to explain to Mya that this is where Scooby-Doo really comes from, but she wasn't buying any of it.

All in all it was a good hike, and I got a good start on outlining the prelude to a book that I'm working on. I donned a headset and plugged it into my voice recorder which I use to then record part of the opening scenes of the prelude. It definitely helped as the prelude takes place on the mountain and it includes the experiences of a small boy walking up the mountain with his grandfather.

So that's how my day went this morning at least, and now into the rest of the evening, have a great deal of work to get done in a number of blog articles that I need to have transcribed off my oyster quarter so I can get them published on my own sites and on several of my clients sites.

There is a tree in the center of this picture, that have leaves that look violet in color. I tried to capture this with my camera, however at best the leaves look all little bit blue.  It was quite an amazing color that I don't think I've ever seen on a tree before, and it was in part due to a trick of the light I'm sure, but it was rather stunning coming down the mountain to see a tree that looked as violet as well as violet as you might pick in a field.

This picture features a pine tree on the edge of a ditch near the side of the road. It's somewhat spectacular in that the trunk actually extends below the ground a couple of feet before branches off into roots.