An afternoon at the Bayou

(Please be warned - impatience is apparently contagious! First, it was Karen...now it's Dave. That, or Dave's got a bad case of ego and wants to see me write about him.)

So yesterday, I decided to check out Armand Bayou. Armand Bayou is one of those places in the Houston area that I've been meaning to visit eventually, and well, I got tired of "eventually". And because walking through the woods (or in this case, bayou) is always a little nicer with some good company, I invited Dave to go with. It was definitely a cool way to spend a couple of hours!

Just one word of caution - watch out for the spiders! Dave had mentioned that visiting the bayou during spider season wasn't the best idea; so I called to ask when spider season is, only to find out it starts in June. Hmm. But hey, the season hasn't even started yet...can't be that bad, right? Well, that depends on your definition of "bad".

Now this little guy only has a leg-span of a couple of inches. But when his web and the webs of all his friends are all over the trees and occasionally over the trail? Yeah, it gets a little nerve-wracking. Because it's way too easy to imagine that the two- to three-inch spider in the web hanging over the trail just might decide to jump as you're passing underneath. Or worse, that you might run into one of the webs. I mean, I'm only five-eight, and I was ducking underneath them at certain points. I can't even imagine what that place looks like in August, when the spiders have been "in season" for three months!

Thankfully, there was plenty else to distract us from the spiders all around! There was the turtle who we weren't quite sure was alive until he moved his head:

the beautiful waterfront that was so quiet, it was hard to believe a city lay just around the corner:

and there was even a deer, munching away on some leaves and trying to decide whether we were worth paying attention to:

But the absolute coolest thing we saw was the armadillos:

They were just poking around in the ground cover, looking for bugs, and let me tell ya - I had no idea armadillos moved so quickly. They just scuttled right along through the underbrush! There were four of them just hanging out and munching down...definitely very cute (in their own little ugly way).

And lest you doubt the spookiness of the spiders at Armand, I'll close with one last picture that just amuses me.

You're thinking, "Big deal. Just a tree." But please look closely. Because that large branch in the middle of the photo? You may notice upon closer examination that it's not attached to any tree. Because it's suspended in a spider web. Do you really want to be out in the woods with spiders who can build webs that are that strong?? Me neither.

Where I am: Home
What I'm reading: Sole Survivor by Dean Koontz

Comments

The Rube said…
Much better. I like the deer with the devil eyes. Even scarier than the spiders.
Anonymous said…
EW! Gross! EW EW EW EW! I am not a fan of spiders. EW! Bleh. Glad you had fun though. But Ew!
Anonymous said…
Icky. And I didn't know that armadillos actually existed live in the wild--I thought they just naturally appeared dead on the side of the road. It's nice to see that some of them can have productive lives :-)

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