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I was up before the sun this morning... in fact, I left the house almost
half an hour before sunrise...
I was heading off to Roger Williams Park in Providence to meet a team of people who work for the same company I do to walk as a team in the 2007 Making Strides walk to raise money to combat breast cancer. |
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The park is a beautiful Victorian-era park with walkways and extensive
lawns and gardens and many magnificent huge mature trees and a zoo and
seven lakes (which themselves total 89 acres in area in addition to the
430 acres of land). We had taken Gillian and Jeremy there to visit the
zoo the first summer we lived in Rhode Island (which would have been the
summer of '96) and have not been back there since then. (Jill & Eli
do go there fairly often, but I had always assumed that it was just because
of the zoo.) So today was the first time I had ever been to any part of
the park other than the zoo.
| The team from my company had arranged to meet by the Temple of Music (one
of the venues for outdoor concerts during the summer). This was a convenient
meeting spot as it was an obvious landmark and was near the registration
area and the start and finish for the walk... but it was a long way from
where I parked. |
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So here I am (on the left). The vest is because it was a bit chilly at
dawn... and was only about 43 (about 6 degrees C) when the walk started...
and on the right is a picture of our team setting off on the walk.
It is very easy to put several thousand people in to a park that large
and not have it feel at all crowded...
The walk was incredibly well-organized... and our group had a very good
time chatting away as we walked, keeping a brisk pace and covering the
four mile loop fairly quickly. Some of them had known each other for years
and some (like me) had never met any of the others... but, since (as Rhode
Islanders are fond of remarking) despite having a population of one million,
Rhode Island is really just like a small town, in the course of conversation
I remarked that Nancy had once worked for our company (when were were still
in upstate New York) but that she was now a math teacher -- which of course
led to the question of what school -- and it turned out that Nancy had
taught the son of the woman who had organized our team (he is now in college
and was also walking with us).
After completing the walk I headed back to my car at a leisurely pace...
and after about fifteen minutes or so I discovered that I had gone around
in a circle and was headed back toward the Temple of Music again. I eventually
found my way to my car, but I enjoyed the beauty of the park and took some
photos along the way.
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| The lakes are home to numbers of ducks and geese and swans... |
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| They seemed to pay no attention to the guy snapping away with his digital
camera... |
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| The bandstand, another popular spot for musical enterainment. |
My goodness, where does the time go? This is the end of today's entry.
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