Most Sundays, Michael takes me out for a ride to some spot where we can quietly enjoy the glorious countryside that is all around us. I thought you might want to see some of my favorite shots of what we’ve seen this year.

Lodgepole Pines

These lodge-pole pines tower several stories above the earth, each as straight as the next, with a thick carpet of sweet smelling needles underneath them. When I snapped this shot, a family of coyotes had just finished serenading us from a nearby spot.

Blue Heron at Dusk

We were watching twilight darken into night last week, at a nearby marina, when this blue heron flew past us, then settled in for the night. Before moving to Wisconsin, the majority of birds I noticed were house sparrows, and city pigeons. Living here, we regularly see scores of different species of birds, from tiny hummers to majestic bald eagles and even, on one memorable occasion, five of the extraordinarily rare and magnificent whooping cranes.

Lodgepole Pines

This is one of our favorite spots to watch sunsets, at the edge of a nearby lake. During the summer, we sometimes see lake sturgeon come to the surface, always a surprising sight as these fish are up to five feet in length.

Many of our friends and family have asked us why we moved, over twenty years ago, from one of the largest metropolitan areas of the country to a ‘backwater’ state, and into a small village to boot. “What’s there?” we’re asked. “Don’t you get bored?”

Bored? Surrounded by this?

Never.