A Slice of Spring

While Megan was setting up her meeting at Duke, they said that we were more than welcome to join her for the day. Well good ole Megs thought about it and thought that while we might enjoy the tour and the lunch (because who doesn't enjoy free lunch?), we (and here, we means a certain two and four year old that belong to our party) may not be so excited about a lecture on physical therapy or discussion on the hot spots in the field. Well, bless her heart, she was exactly right. So, we dropped her off and drove around looking for something to do. We stumbled upon the The Sarah P Duke Gardens. Since the weather was about 25-30 degrees warmer in Durham than it is here at home, we thought we would jump out and take advantage of an opportunity for the kids to run wild. Now if only spring would hurry up and come to Baltimore.

I call this the Mr. Miyagi bridge. Remind anyone else of Karate Kid? No? Just me?

I love this family. Just look at them.

Earth Friendly. Period.

"...and it was a beautiful butterfly." -Eric Carle

There were all kinds of ducks in one of the ponds that I had never seen before (which isn't saying much, I guess, because I think the only ducks I ever have seen are mallards). There were some cool black and white ones and these gold (Ruddy Shelduck, actually) ones were my favorite (if you can have a favorite type of duck).

There were several different kinds of flowers throughout the gardens, but none of them were in really great shape, so you get these cool curly branches instead.

And this bamboo.

Ope wait. Here's some flowers. These were actually on a tree and they smelled like cinnamon. Any horticulturists know what the tree was? Because I thought that was pretty dang cool.

Oh this duck. We loved this duck. It is the weirdest duck I've ever seen (no offense to him). It's called a Muscovy duck, and as previously mentioned I don't have much experience with ducks, but I think it was showing off. It kept ducking under the water and then shaking it off and puffing it's feathers out all big and looking at us. Then finally it gave us a couple of big flaps, as shown above, and then just swam away. Just like that. Unfortunately for him, we don't play hard to get very well. We got our picture and moved right on to the next ducks that were more than happy to entertain us. That'll teach him. Silly duck.