Pink - Day 222

  We awoke to this sky. And it delivered what "red skies in the morning" are noted for. I had planned to be hitching up the trailer at this time, but we were waiting out a thunderstorm. Fortunately, it did not last long. And we moved to a new base today. That always takes extra time.

I got on the trail late, but the temperature didn't completely skyrocket, and I was able to eat lunch on a cool, shaded church lawn. There was also a good breeze.

Those of you who have been reading this blog for a long time know that pink is perhaps my least favorite color. But if it comes attached to green leaves or other natural phenomena, I can handle it. Here's a sampling from North Dakota to go with the sky.

This is smooth rose, Rosa blanda. It has no/very few thorns. Here I am in the Prairie Rose State, but I haven't found a prairie rose yet. I find wild roses tedious to separate. I can seldom remember which have curved thorns, leaves with pale undersides, etc. I know, I know, I'm the botany person, but roses don't appeal to me all that much. Probably because they are usually pink! (Although I can spot that horrid monster, multiflora rose, from a moving car.)

This is water smartweed, but it's an interesting variant. Most have truncated flower spikes, but these are tall. Some classify it as a variety of Persicaria amphibia, and others say it's a different species, Persicaria emersa.

This is common hedge bindweed, but these ones have pink flowers. It's more often white. Convolvulus sepium

And swamp milkweed, one of my favorite milkweeds, but it's pink, so I guess that disproves my theory about why I don't like roses. Asclepias incarnata

It was hard to choose today's lonely North Dakota picture. I took some that take in more empty space, and another with a hill and a fence, but this one called to me. Instead of being a straight line, this road curves beside another of those unnamed temporal wetlands. It just makes we want to follow it into the lonely unknown. So I did! This is the trail.

And a huge thank you to our last host in New Rockford, Deb. She is the manager (and also does a lot of other things) for the Dakota Prairie Regional Center for the Arts where we saw Little Shop of Horrors.

Miles today: 15.2. Total miles so far: 2685.3

See Western Grebe