Barefoot in the Park - Part I: Setting the Scene

Here I am off on my adventure to drive to barefoot explore the county park. Daffodil is thrilled to go for a car ride. I took these pictures when I was stopped at a red light.

I really hate to drive in a car to go run. Part of what I love about running is that it doesn't take a car or gasoline. This park is only two and a half miles down the road, and a more developed runner would run to this park to have this adventure, but for now I have to drive there if I want to run there. But my future plans are to eventually run there and do a couple of loops and run back. That would be wonderful. Only I wonder if Daffodil will be able to run that far when the time comes?

We arrive at the park and I let Daffodil know we're here:

From now on you're going to have to realize that every picture I take is while holding a dog on a dog leash, and sometimes she's pulling and it's hard to keep the camera steady.

The first thing we have to do is make sure my flip flops are secure.  The other day when I went out I was constantly having to monitor my flip flops, which I had tucked into the belt of the waist pack I wear.  This time I am going to thread the flip flops through the belt and secure them so I can forget about them.

This is really dumb, but I had to try a few times to get a good picture of the flip flop attachment.

Now the dog, flip flops, and feet were good to go. Let's take a look at the scenery.

There is a lake in the middle of the park and I'm planning to run around that lake. mapmyrun.com says it is .82 miles or something like that around the lake. So, I'm going to walk for a warm-up to the other side of the lake and run around it 1 1/2 times.

I remember from the other day, that this bridge over here heads into a "trail."  I walked on that trail with my Tevas, but today I'm going to walk on it barefoot.

As I head over there, I notice that this lush green grass in the shade feels really great on my feet. I'm not on grass very often with my bare feet in this urban environment. It's a definite reminder of the wonderful way it felt to be barefoot all summer, and especially to golf barefoot, which I did a lot when I was a kid.

So, here we are at the end of the preliminaries. I'll continue with Part II: The Trail Warm-Up in the next post.