Missy and I took the dogs outside tonight and saw a bunch of lizards all around our backyard patio. We think that they like the light that's on outside because it attracts bugs and these lizards eat bugs! Anyway, these guys are friendly and rather small (about as long as a pen). As far as I'm concerned, I want as many lizards to live around our house as possible because they'll eat all the nasty bugs! As the days get warmer and sunny, we'll start to see these little guys sunning themselves on our house and sometimes on our woodpile. Anyway, I think I'll call him Seymour.

Hi! This is me on a small bridge over the stream. We crossed this stream about 10 times during our hike. In some spots we used a bridge to cross the stream and in other spots, you just had to skip from rock to rock to cross. My hiking shoes are waterproof, so my feet didn't get wet. An interesting thing about this picture is painted on the tree behind me. Do you see it? There is a blue mark on that tree above my left shoulder. Those blue marks tell you that you're on the trail. It's there so you don't get lost. It would be pretty hard to get lost when you're hiking these trails because the trail is so obvious and you've got a reminder of where the trail is headed when you see the blue marks.

This picture is from the end of our hike. We traveled through this forest of baby pine trees. Remember how I said that there were two major kinds of pine trees in Georgia? The Loblolly Pine and the Longleaf pine? Well, this is a forest of baby Longleaf pine trees. It was really strange hiking through this part of the trail because the pine trees looked so strange. It doesn't look like it from this picture but the baby pine trees were about 6-10 feet tall. Do you see the tall pine trees in the background? Those are adult longleaf pine trees (which can grow to 150 feet tall)!

This tree has a name. It's named "Ferney" and as you can see from the picture, it's as wide as both me and Missy combined. There are two kinds of pine trees in Georgia that I know of (the Loblolly Pine and the Longleaf pine). Ferney is a Loblolly pine tree. I wonder how old it is? I was guessing with Missy that it could be 200 years old!

Missy and I went on another hike to Pine Mountain this weekend. We hiked almost 7 miles through pine forests and up and down rocky trails. We were near a stream for much of the hike and this picture shows one of the many waterfalls that the stream had. We didn't see any wildlife on this hike except for small fish that live in the creek.

The weather has been warmer in Georgia lately (in the mid 70's) and when it's this warm, the lizards come out! I saw this guy camping out under our back porch this evening. I think he's technically a gecko. I like Geckos because they eat bugs and there sure are a lot of bugs around where we live! What do you think I should call this lizard?

This picture was taken when we were on top of "Pine Mountain". Pine Mountain is about 1,300 feet tall (which isn't a very big mountain). But, it's in a part of Georgia where a bunch of little mountains come out of the ground to start the Appalachian Mountain Range and the Appalachian Mountain Range has much bigger mountains! In this picture, if you look closely, you can see dark green trees and lighter brown trees. Well, the dark green trees are pine trees and the light brown trees are other kinds of trees (like the ones we have in Illinois). We didn't see any wildlife on our hike except for one hawk who was soaring and probably looking for dinner!