Daily Goods From Our Walk in the Woods {CSI Case File No. 27}

I'm always excited to begin a new month at CSI: Color, Stories, Inspiration. A new month means a new sponsor, new guest designers, and a brand-new theme. I've chosen a delicious theme in honor of July, which is officially National Ice Cream Month. Here's our first Case File for July:

Here is my page. (The black border is digital). I documented some things about this path my friend and I started walking daily for exercise.

Clues I used...Evidence: fence, leaves, flower, rainbow, woodland animals, sparkles, clouds, long title; Testimony: I documented something about the outdoors and I rhymed my long title.

Here are some details. Echo Park is sponsoring CSI this month, so I went to my Echo Park stash first. The tape measure is from an Echo Park paper. I used it to symbolize the inches I'm losing and also the distance that we're walking every day. That arrow is also from an Echo Park chevron paper. I've had that green wooden frame FOREVER. I have 3 and have always wanted to use it but somehow it never worked out. The arrow is pointing to a deer we saw. The fence is a border punch by Martha Stewart. The little deer brad is by DCWV.

The viewmaster thingamajig and the camera are also from Echo Park and represent the sights we see every day when we're walking in the woods. The cloud, the yellow gingham, the blue polka dot, the phrase labels, the rainbow, and the leaf are all in this week's CSI Coordinates (plus there's lots more--you can find these at the bottom of our reveal). The deer was cut from a Sassafras Lass paper.

My journaling pulls out. The journaling cards are from an Echo Park paper too. Fortunately, I had two sheets of this paper because my journaling wound up long. My story took another turn as I wrote it, which is why my page has two titles. I usually start my pages by doing the journaling, but on this one, I sort of knew what I was going to say and I started working on the page first. I wanted a rhyming title and came up with "Daily Goods from our Walk in the Woods," and I was going to write about all the things we see on the trail

As I started writing, the story took a turn, but I was wedded to that rhyming title, so I decided to put the second title on there in parentheses.

Here's my journaling:  I've come to think of this stretch of the C&O Canal as "our towpath." We never see anyone else walking the path--just bikers every once in a while. Maybe it's because we start our walk at 6:15 on weekday mornings, but really, it's more fun to think we're alone because it's "our towpath."

And it's "our towpath" because I already feel at home in these woods in just a couple of short weeks. Even after the first day or two, I started to recognize and name little landmarks. "The Waterfall Spot," the little area with the beautiful view of the river on one side and an invisible waterfall on the other. "The Rain Place," that spot with the rust colored mushy mossy carpeted ground where we turned back when it started raining hard that very first day we walked the path.

It's "our towpath because it's right in our back yard. Well, not literally, but it's a short ten minute  drive from my house. I never knew the canal was so close to our home, so it's like one of those serendipitous backyard discoveries. 

And it's our towpath because on our walks we encounter little forest friends. Just about every day we see at least five deer cross the path (you can see one in the framed photo if you look close) and bunnies galore and the occasional groundhog, fox, or chipmunk. Oh, and the birds. They sing to us as we walk "our towpath." All kinds of strange and wonderful  songs that make us feel like we're in our own private tropical rainforest with not just woodland animals but monkeys and exotic birds. 

 It's "our towpath" because Kathy and I are building a fun little history of experiences like walking into cobwebs and simultaneously having aching toes and witnessing the aftermath of the summer storms that turned our towpath into what looked like a war zone. And together we celebrate the exhilaration of  milestones like reaching the Monocacy Aqueduct.

 It's "our towpath" because I'm coming to know its rich history. Every day I come home with questions and seek answers from the Internet and have found out wonderful things like George Washington dined at  a restaurant nearby called The Dutchman and traveled on Noland's Ferry, and that the son of the owner of Noland's Ferry married the daughter of the Lucketts family, which was fun to learn because Lucketts is a nearby town in Virginia where we've gone to junque lots of times. I found out that Route 15 is the site of the old Carolina Road, which dates back to colonial times. As I learn the history of this amazing and important place, and as I walk this trail most every day, it's becoming a part of me, and it's almost like I'm becoming a little part of the history of "our towpath."

I can't wait to see what exciting adventures and discoveries unfold as we walk "our towpath," in the coming weeks and months--and hopefully years.

Come see the fantastic pages by our design team and guest designers, and I hope you'll play along with us--you might wind up a guest designer or even win the prize from Echo Park.

Thank you so much for stopping by my blog and reading about my page!