So here’s what I did for myself today – took an hour out of the morning to bike a new leg of Legacy Trail with John and Cooper. The weather was overcast with a constant sprinkle, just enough to stave off the heat but not so much to get soaked. This may seem strange to a Northerner, but it was nicer than any average sunny July day in Sarasota. And we spotted tons of birds along the way – herons, egrets, cardinals, and cranes.
This leg lost some of its appeal with our first failed attempt a few years ago, and we hadn’t been back until today. It really doesn’t matter how many wheels, if I’m on them, some sort of accident is looming. The parking for this trail head is at the YMCA on Central Sarasota Parkway, but you have to travel the surrounding roads and trails to actually get to Legacy Trail. The pictures above were taken on the Stoneybrook Nature Trail that connects to the trail head.
But John and I didn’t know all that the first time we went and ended up riding around on the trails behind the Y looking for it. It’s pleasant back there. We were riding side-by-side, chatting the whole way until my entire head was enveloped by a patch of hanging vines. They caught my face like a triple-looped lasso. Two snapped across my nose and one under my eye. The latter did some damage. John kept telling me I looked fine, but he was especially unconvincing when I kept waiving my index finger around my right eye saying, “It really hurts right here…are you sure it looks okay?” We headed back to the car and it absolutely did not look okay. The vine rubbed off the skin on my lower eye lid, so it looked like I had a black eye for a week. We got a good laugh but headed home without ever actually making it to the trail.
This trip was much less painful and a little more mysterious. We spotted a flower with holes. Google won’t even help me out with this one.
The flower looks like it belongs to the Morning Glory family. Railroad vine falls under this category, which would be fitting since Legacy Trail is a rails to trails effort. But the holes don’t match up with any plants or pictures I’ve seen, and they look too perfect to be the result of a hungry bug. Combining my recent magical thinking with the preciseness of each duo of holes, today’s item-of-the-day-worth-noticing is a fairy’s flower version of a paper snowflake.
