Binoculars Anyone?

Snapshots In My Time...
Of My Time.....Hauntings.

I used to live near the Eno River. It was my home away from home. I would go hiking in the woods at least once a week. I even used to go by myself most of the time. I did not have a lot of friends who were into hiking. After a while I did have a friend who would go with me. Lori was her name. I remember one adventure in particular. North Carolina is hilly and has mountains and one saturday morning Lori and I got up early and went hiking. I took a can of red paint to mark the trees so we could find our way out. We hiked into the woods about 3 miles. We are not talking a marked trail. Deep woods. We came to clearing that had some huge rocks and boulders. We decided to climb. I mean HUGE boulders. As big as a house or bigger with crevices. We climbed up and we had lunch up on one of these boulders. After a while, we decided to go. I froze. I could not get down. We had used our bare hands to climb up and we had no problems. I could not get a handhold or find a way to start down. I was about 18 feet up in the air. I got panicked.

Lori tried talking me down and talking me down and talking some more. Nothing was working. We decided that she needed to hike out and get the fire department/rescue to come get me. She did not want to go as she was not an experienced hiker and was not sure she could get out and if she did, she might not be able to get back to me. She said she did not pay attention to where I had been marking trees. Remember we had no path, we were just hiking in deep woods and underbrush. She had just followed me blindly in as I knew what I was doing.
(psych!)

We waited about another hour and just did nothing. Then we tried again and this time she was able to talk me down, telling me where to put my hands and feet to pick up the very slight indentations in the rocks I had used to climb up. That was a scary day. I was frazzled and did not see ANY of the red paint markers I had sprayed on the trees to get up in those deep woods. Luckily, once I got down off the rock I decided to just walk staight and we did finally get out about a mile away from the car. Can we say Blair Witch Project?
I swear it was almost like that!

That was then. Now I live near a state park that had free birding every saturday morning from 8:30-12:30 with a guide. You start out at 8:30 and your excursion is not done until 12:30. I want to go. I have tried to get a girlfriend of mine to go with me and she does not want to go. I think it will be fun. I called the park about a month ago to find out what sort of things I would need to get ready for a morning of birding. I was told that I would need to wear light colored clothing, things that tended to blend in with the environment. We would be apt so see more birds if we blended in with nature. There was a check list of birds on their site that I needed to download so that as we saw birds, I could check them off.

The next thing we needed were binoculars . Now I did not have a pair of those at all. I asked if they had any to rent or use for the trip. They did but I wondered about how good they were and would they have enough, if a lot of people went the morning I finally snagged someone to go with me. I went to my local discount stores and checked someout and they were very expensive. Noone seemed to have a inexpensive pair that would most likely just be used a few times a year. I looked on line as well and found some.. all still faily expensive. Maybe that is just what they cost as they are a specialty item.

You know even if my friends did not want to go birding, at least they could go for the walk. That is a 4 hour hike. It is a darned good workout. Go just for that. The birding would be a plus and they would learn something. I found "10 reasons to go birding," which I tend to encourage my friend to check out. I also found some great birding binoculars that are actually under $100. Check them out here: Bushnell Natureview Plus Binoculars and the Celestron Outland binoculars. The site they are on have a lot more that just birding binoculars. They have binoculars for all occasions. Check them out below:

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Happy Birding!