Stolen Time

 Having Mondays off still feels somehow illicit to me. I don't know if I will ever feel otherwise. I sort of hope not, because there is a delicious pleasure to be gleaned from slipping away from the city on a weekday that is not in the middle of vacation season. The roads are free of traffic. Everything seems quieter and slower.

What's even better is to have a partner with whom to enjoy these exquisite moments. I am lucky enough to have that as well.

Today we ventured East to the St. Croix river valley. It is one of those fall days where the sky is overcast, but not so much that the sun doesn't shout out once in awhile from the cozy blanket of clouds to illuminate the salmon, vermillion, tangerine, chartreuse and lemon-hued leaves. The fall colors do not appear to be daunted by this year's drought. Or if they are, then the blasts of brightness they provide is sufficient to awe me, anyway, into forgetting any other fall that may have outdone this one.

We were eager to check out a place that was new to us-- the appropriately-named Pleasant Valley Orchard. We were pleased indeed to be greeted, not by a crush of humanity looking for parking spaces, as has been my weekend experience with other local orchards, but a quiet crunch of gravel under the tires as we pulled right in front of the red barn.

A smattering of oversized squash lay on the grass, next to a charming hay wagon filled with big orange pumpkins, and a crate full of pale white pumpkins. It was the goldilocks of squash display-- neither too many to overwhelm, nor so few that it felt sparse. They looked radiant lying there in the sunlight. So I asked my sweetie to lie down next to them for a photo. Lucky for me, he's game for such spontaneity, and the picture turned out great.

I started looking through the bin of white pumpkins for something that would make a nice companion to the mums I bought last week for the front steps, when my sweetie uttered something that made my head swivel away from the pumpkins. "Goats!"

Sure enough, inside a small pen next to the little red barn were three goats. One white, one black and one brown. We made a quick beeline for the critters, as we've both become fascinated with them ever since we saw a series of you tube videos featuring talking and fainting goats. While reading a biography of Teddy Roosevelt, my sweetie even found a phrase that somehow has gone out of vogue, and that we like to resurrect whenever possible: "more fun than a goat."

We did not feed them, since a nearby sign implored us to leave them to their vet-approved diet, but they were chewing on something, so any begging they did through the fence was purely for extra snacks. We got close enough to look into those crazy goat eyes. What a creature.

After wandering around a little bit, taking some shots of the crazily photogenic apples bursting out of the trees, and watching a bird of prey soar over the river valley, we decided on some treats to take home. The turnover and caramel apple, however, were never meant to make it to the car.

Happy trails! I raise my glass of cider to illicit Monday adventures.