Walking tour

Someone was mentioning to me yesterday that they had found a great place to go walking and so they were driving out there daily to do an hour walk.

"It is a lot like the area around you, Tanya. Maybe the forest is not as nice as yours but it is very similar."

How about that! I live in a nice walking area and I don't even have to drive anywhere to get to it! So I'll share a few more pictures of my walking roads.

The first picture was taken when the fields were just beginning to be harvested. I don't know why they stopped that day in the middle of harvesting.

Here is a little combine that I think is mixing the soil after the rice has been harvested. Some farmers seem to own their own machines and have them in sheds but many of the machines seem to be on loan from the agriculture co-op.





This is one of the houses around the area. Not very large and I think the husband works for a construction company full time but has a couple rice fields near by. There are fewer and fewer full time farmers nowadays and the younger generation is no longer living on the farms and doing farm work. The garden here out in front is tended exclusively by the family's old grandmother who is quite bent over and needs to lean on a stroller to walk around.

This is a typical farm house with its bright red roof sitting up against the dark forest. These houses used to have thatched roofs but we don't see those at all anymore in this area (some in the north). There are no longer any craftsmen who know how to make thatched roofs and so the houses are roofed in metal siding (red or blue) and some homes have tile roofs. In the forefront is a soybean field and that line of red is Japanese amaryllis.

This little shed is just on the other side of the forest from me. I don't know why I like it. It is so run down and rickety. This used to belong to a pig farmer (we could sure smell the pigs when the farm was booming!) and sometimes late at night there would be a light inside and I'd know that the farmer was inside waiting for some sow to have her litter. Even then the windows were broken and the roof would be flapping in the wind. Not much more protection than the pig stalls themselves.

Well, that's my walking tour.