The question jolted me away from what was about a ten minutes nap. Yesterday's 700 miles had been grueling and I found myself getting sleepy with no roadside rest area expected soon. I’d taken the next exit and pulled over onto the ramp shoulder, shut the car down, and asked Steve to wake me in a half hour. That usually does the trick for me in bringing back full alertness for several more hours driving. After two million career miles under my belt, I've gotten a good feel for what works.
My opening eyes caught the blue flashing lights on the car parked immediately behind us. Oh oh! Were we in trouble? The answer was clearly a maybe. I quickly rolled my window down and explained I’d been getting sleepy and decided to pull over for safety.
We didn’t get a name, but Steve says his badge said Chief Deputy and the car said Sheriff. We could assume power and experience then, not some hot-shot rookie scared of a shadow. He explained the he appreciated our being safe but the shoulder of the exit ramp was an illegal parking spot.
Really? Most of the morning already every freeway exit and entrance ramp's shoulders had been completely lined with semis. We also saw them partly blocking roadside rest access to/from the freeway as well. I wasn’t going to argue, however. He continued informing us they’d been having a lot of problems recently with people leaving behind their trash along the road. As he spoke I looked ahead of us and saw three different sets of piles of trash bags, one set sitting right under - you guessed it - a clear no parking sign.
I immediately apologized, letting him know that now that I was fully awake (cops can do that to you) I could clearly see the sign I’d missed earlier.
He, in turn, pointed down the road heading into the town the exit was for, suggesting we follow the path of a car currently driving along it. When the car reached a stop sign, he pointed out the park just at that turn, suggesting we could head there, find some shade, and continue resting until ready to drive again. So we left, and noted he turned and went a different direction. No checking up on us then. Steve and I looked at each other and agreed he'd likely already done his checking from our license plate before approaching the car. Wouldn't anybody these days?
It was a very nice park, a currently unoccupied pavilion in a wide expanse of grass, some historical markers along the drive in with a huge parking lot behind them. Best of all was a small lake or large pond, depending on how you categorize them. Minnesotans would call it a pond, but then they're blessed with an abundance and can be fussy about such things. There was a drive along the far side of it marked “Dead End”, with couple cars on it, and somebody fishing off one of several short docks stretching out over the water. Trees did indeed give some lovely shade so we headed there.
Just after reaching the road I stopped dead. No, this wasn’t a spot to nap. The water was full of ducks on our end, and was that a heron? Sure was! In the time it took to identify the heron as such and not what I first thought was a piece of driftwood sticking up out of the water, still as it had been while waiting for breakfast to swim by, a couple pairs of geese added to the crowd. Yep, camera time! For both of us, actually, since Steve decided he could use some practice for the critters we hoped to see later in the day. After a couple shots where the heron was still a black shadow, I moved the car about 90 degrees around the lake and sun gave the heron some actual color. We watched it hunt for several minutes, moving here and there and getting different colors and textures in the water background in our pictures.
There was no more napping. After that little bonus, plus just a touch of adrenaline topping off my earlier catnap, who needed sleep?
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