After Thursday’s heavy rain and Friday’s dreary weather, Saturday dawned cool, clear and bright.  I launched early towards the Park.  I eventually got fifteen miles.  Here is who and what I saw there:

I had just snapped the above picture of a Belted Kingfisher (I love the gnarlyness of the branch that he had just been sitting on.) and was in the process of giving an elderly woman directions on how to get back to the Chase hotel, when Edward and I saw each other.  I am speaking of Edward Crim, author of the Forest Park 365 blog.  I had first met Edward in the early spring.  He was still in the first quarter of his year-long project to blog every day about Forest Park.  It was during the nesting time of the Great Horned Owls.  Now he is in the last quarter of his year-long project.  I think that he has done a great job of chronicling both the monumental and the mundane aspects of the Park.  I hope that he writes a book about the experience. 

We commiserated about the difficulty of photographing Kingfishers, they are always moving, but I later remembered the shot to die for that he got earlier this year.  He also confirmed my suspicion that the Great Horn Owl’s nest had been destroyed by storm damage.  He was not concerned though since the owl pair has had to relocate before.

I returned home, showered and changed and then Anne, Rey and I launched on a walk.  We got “lost” about a mile from the house, because the Clayton neighborhood that previously been content to just have private street that allowed pedestrian traffic, but excluded vehicle traffic has now decided that pedestrians are bad too.  After some backtracking, we made it to Washington University.  As we walked through it, we showed Rey the campus. 

Eventually we arrived at our destination, breakfast at Kayak’s Coffee.  Anne and Rey had Kayak’s Belgium Waffles which were interestingly different.  They each got three hot dog shaped waffle boats, that were in turn filled with strawberries, whipped cream and eventually syrup.  I kept trying to get them to pick one of them up in their hands and eat it hot dog style, but they persisted with using their knives and forks.  After breakfast we walked up the western edge of the Park, along Skinker and then crossed into the DeMun neighborhood.  Rey was disappointed that it was not pronounced demon.  Nearing home, Anne and Rey peeled off into Oak Knoll Park to check on the Red Thread Project.  There is a picture of the installation below.  Anne found the two hats that she had knitted.  They also just happened to bump into Joanie there.