Celebrating a little “Snail Mail Monday” with my newest postcards from THE POSTCARD CLUB. Another grouping of beautiful photo cards to send out the old-school way! If you like getting & sending actual mail & saying “Hi” to good friends… check ’em out.

Click here for THE POSTCARD CLUB!

You gotta love the fantastic colors that magically appear
during the Autumn season.

What a difference a little “focus” can make!

The weather this week has been AMAZING!
So who could “blame me” for taking another day off to play hooky?!

I decided today to check out another one of our beautiful Illinois State Parks… by heading up to Moraine Hills State Park pretty far up in the north-eastern-most corner of Illinois. The Fall colors were pretty great, an incredible blue sky, perfect temps… and practically no one was there!!!

I did all three loops of the park and maybe passed a dozen people all day. I saw more sandhill cranes, snowy egrets & great blue herons than people… oh yeah, and two snakes!!!

Another hazy-foggy start with the marine layer delaying the sun’s appearance. Well worth the wait… as a big red ball appeared, and then “bounced” on reflected ripples.

With Summer coming all-too-quickly to an end, and a BEAUTIFUL day last Wednesday, I decided to take the day off and play hooky!!! I drove up to Rock Cut State Park in Rockford.

We used to go camping there all the time as kids, so it was a bit of a flashback! Such a beautiful day hiking around the lake a couple times… logging in some good miles of beautiful scenery… and a very relaxing & much needed day off!

CAUTION ALERT – – –
And after a LOT of beautiful scenery… of course we had to have a bit of reality! Which of course is totally fine by me… I have a strange attraction to roadkill. The whole “circle of life” thing I guess.

One of the challenges of catching splashy photos on a windy morning is that the “mist” keeps hitting the camera lens! So you pretty much need to dry the lens after every shot… or every crashing wave. It gets a little tiresome… but if you don’t wipe it off, you get THIS!!!

Which now that I look at it… this isn’t too shabby either?!!
Hard to mess up a beautiful sunrise, huh?!

It was SO good to see colorful sunrise clouds again… and the crashing waves didn’t hurt any either! It was a big sky morning… which required a big sky photo!!!

Sometimes a bigger sunrise requires a bigger panoramic photo
to capture the morning sky show!

Two more pictures from this morning… when the colors were sweeping across the horizon. One before, and one after the sun made its grand appearance!