Once again Fall has arrived, and as usual I couldn't be happier!
Cooler temperatures (46 F last night!) make for delicious crisp mornings with ribbons of fog hanging low in the hills.
The stores are selling pumpkins in all sizes, there's apple cider and cinnamon lattes and cozy afternoons in front of the fire ... or the little (electric) 'wood'-stove in our case.
As I said, I'm the happiest camper!
I unearthed my fall-decorations, they're stored under the bed, which involves James lifting the bed up while I try to determine which plastic bags hold what decorations.
(The pneumatic springs that should hold the bed up by itself are a little too light to stay up by themselves.)
He actually had to repeat that 3 times since every time I thought that that was all, I remembered something else that should be there and he had to do it all over again.
Through the years I might have acquired a little more stuff than I thought?
Any-who, it definitely brightens up the room and never fails to get me in the mood!
On most days, despite the cooler temperatures, the sun still comes out and James cooked up a nice breakfast outside on the BBQ :
Thus filled up with a stick-to-your-ribs 'grand-slam' we set out for a little hiking and sight-seeing.
It had been a while since we went exploring and I really needed a change of scenery and some fresh air in my lungs.
For some reason I'd missed the existence of a nice lake, Henry Hagg lake, only about half an hour of where we are at right now and according to the website it had 14 miles of hiking trails all around it!
We took the back-roads, driving through the nice rolling hills of Oregon's Yamhill countryside until we arrived at Scoggins Valley Park, home to said lake, just outside the tiny town of Gaston.
There's no fee to drive through the park but if you want to park and hike you have to buy a $7 day pass. 
Henry Hagg Lake is a large multipurpose reservoir, created
in 1974 by the Bureau of Reclamation with the construction of an
earthfill dam (Scoggins Dam), at the top left of the picture, on Scoggins Creek.
Besides the lake the park also features two boat launching facilities, the trails I read about, an 18 hole disc golf course, and many picnic areas.
We hiked a couple of miles of the trail between the Eagle Point recreation area and Cedar Grove. Since there's only one trail(-loop) you either have to walk the whole trail (14 miles) or backtrack the couple of miles you hike back to where you started from (and where you parked).
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| Eagle Point Recreation Area |
We created our own mini-loop by walking the actual trail through the trees above the lake- shore towards the grove and than walked down to the lake to follow the lake's beach on the way back.
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| Cedar Grove, our turn-around point .. |
After taking a little coffee break (of course we brought our thermoses!) we took the car to take the loop-road around the lake to the fishing pier on the other side ...
Where we had some more coffee and watched this furry, brown thing swim steadily through the lake as on his way to .. somewhere?
At first we thought it was a Beaver but although they call this area home as well, I'm pretty sure this actually is a Muskrat.
Identification by it's tail would be the easiest but that's not so easy when they're in the water so I'm relying on the fact that when swimming you mostly only see the head of a beaver and it looks sleek and streamlined, whereas the muskrat shows more of it's body and looks much 'fluffier', like a fur-ball with eyes.
All in all, it was a beautiful morning and it was probably a good call we went when we went because it might have been the last of such days for a while .. there's 7 days of rain in the forecast!
Time for soups and stews and comfort food, like this huge (instant) pot of 15-bean soup I'd had the foresight to cook on Saturday.
Either way, I'm going to enjoy every day of it!
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