..wistful weekend..

Ahh, that all weekends were long ones.  I took a paid day off on last Monday to extend the weekend and ended up with Tuesday as my day off this week!  So, I had a lovely four day weekend.  Saturday we drove up to Eureka Springs for our friends' wedding at beautiful Blue Spring.  Congrats to Jason and Julianna!  I was amazed by the park, it was so cool, the pics don't do it justice.  Other than the blazing Arkansas heat, everything was lovely. 

 We stopped on the way home to feel out how hard it would be to transplant some local wildflowers.  Next trip we will bring a shovel.

 By this point I had shed a few layers, and my heels :)

Since Mike has been getting into growing things that are indigenous and useful, we have decided to start keeping an eye out for some hardy plots of Echinacea, so we can transplant and/or harvest seeds.  Echinacea is a natural immune system booster and can be used for mild localized pain relief.  If you have any of the plants handy it is actually kind of cool to test out the latter.  You take a pinch of freshly harvested seeds and chew them in between your front teeth for a few moments then spit them out.  The tip of your tongue will have a strong tingling sensation.  Unfortunately, at this point in the summer it seems that much of the plants are starting to succumb to the heat.  

On Sunday afternoon, Mike and I headed out to Cove Lake to camp for the night.  Somehow the weather was just perfect and we had a really nice relaxing time.  My stupid little camera has been flaking out a bit, so we didn't get many good photos, but you can take my word that Cove Lake is really nice. The swimming area is well maintained, there is concession most days in the summer, and they have bathrooms with showers in the concession building.  Sounds a bit luxurious for camping I know, but don't get your hopes up too much.  The actual camp sites don't have individual water spouts and they don't have electric hookups.  I kind of prefer roughing it a bit at least. 

So, we tried to fish, swam a bit, made hotdogs and smores, then hit the sack.  In the morning we had a early swim, packed up our stuff and hung out on the grassy beach a while before we headed back home.  And, yay! on our way home, we found some echinacea that we were able to take a few starts from and plant at the house.  I love them almost as much as all the butterflies and bees do.