Little Adventure on the Prairie

This is the view of the hill my house is on. The itty bitty water tower in the picture is on the street directly above mine, the last one on the top of the hill.

When I flew into Syracuse yesterday evening, I noticed that the color had ramped up while I was away. Today seemed like it was going to be another beautiful fall day. Since the girls had no school, I tried to come up with something to do with the afternoon.

There is an area I can see from our hill that always looks so pretty. Someone once told me there were trails over there. I figured out that this was the "Camillus Unique Forest Area" and there are trails back there. They are just hard to follow, supposedly, and it is easy to get lost. Perfect adventure for my kids. I printed out trail instructions that said things like "when trail forks, turn to the right past some old farm equipment." It's a five minute drive from my house, literally. I was certain we could not get really lost.

The best surprise was that there were tons of wildflowers in bloom, of all different varieties. They were playing Little House on the Prairie here. What else?
This fallen tree was enormous, and I couldn't get the whole thing in as Molly requested.
I hope you are clicking on the pictures to get better close up views. Everything looked amazing in the kind of light filtering through the trees.
It's fun to discover great places that are super close to home. Oh, and we got all turned around once and had to backtrack, but we didn't get lost. Obviously, since I posted about it...