Celebrating Two Years

Ron asked what I wanted to do to celebrate our second anniversary.  A couple of months ago, we considered going out of town for a couple of days, but getting our work schedules to coincide turned out to be rather tricky, so we scrapped that idea.  We decided to just have a nice dinner out instead and just spend time together working in the yard or whatever.   Then, at the very last minute, I came up with a new plan.  An impromptu road trip!   Ron needed to get the oil changed on his truck before we left Saturday, but it seemed to take him an extra long time.  Then, just before he got back home, the door bell rang.  It was a delivery for me---13 long-stem red roses!  Beautiful!   Apparently, Ron had ordered them to be delivered before we planned the trip and he had to make a few phone calls to be sure they were delivered before we left town.

We left town just after noon and headed to Kisatchie National Forest.  As a college student, I went to Kisatchie from time to time for science classes, but, I never realized how large it actually is and how many different districts there were.  I picked out a hiking trail in the Calcasieu District and we meandered our way through the back roads to get there.

The weather was wonderful and we had the trail mostly to ourselves.

The Wild Azalea Trail is actually very long (26 miles), and often used for backpacking, but we chose to just hike in about 2.5 miles and back out.  Along the way, we passed an abandoned fire tower and enjoyed a nice breeze among the trees.

Parts of the trail are lower and filled with hardwood trees.  Do you see the heart below?  I didn't even notice that until I uploaded my photos onto the computer.  Pretty cool!!

Other parts of the trail are hillier and surrounded by Longleaf pines.

Naturally, my favorite part of the hike was rounding the corner of the trail to find the beautiful wild azaleas for which the trail is named.

 Butterflies were everywhere and the aroma of the flowers was wonderful!

I'd never seen wild azaleas before and loved their texture, with the delicate blossoms hanging down.

We crossed a couple of streams and attempted to take a selfie on one of the bridges by setting my timer on my iPhone.  Unfortunately, I actually hit the time lapse button and it resulted in this:

We did manage to get this one photo, however.  Ron does not look especially happy to be there, or perhaps he is concerned by all the commotion it took to get this one, awkward photo.

On the hike back to the trailhead, the sun was highlighting the azaleas in such a pretty way.

And we ran across a couple of crawfish holes on the trail, as well.

After driving around the park, we once again began dreaming about having a camper of some sort--someday, we thought aloud.  Our long day was made even better, when this beautiful sunset showed up in the sky on the way home.  What a perfect ending to a great day