"easy"

It has been dawning upon me that "easy" is relative and, instead of searching for "easy", I should really be looking for "difficult". Once I find that, I can decide if endeavour, or avoidance, would be the best strategy.

This morning, the dog and I jogged a very easy mile with pit stops and sniff stops and raptor viewing stops. We are still in the extended stay place, albeit in different circumstances, and it is in the typical sort of motel area with roads for cars only. However, development hasn't quite swallowed farmland and we found a nearby dirt road going to/through some fields. I don't want to run the entire road because it probably leads to someone who might not want us using it, but since there is no stock in the fields and we'll stick to the road, we aren't doing too much harm using the outside bit of it. There are no trespassing signs either.

This afternoon, my husband, the dog and I headed to the lake. It wasn't quite what we expected:
The lake is quite large, the trails are lovely, and hilly. We saw a couple types of woodpeckers, a swan of some sort, lots of other birds, especially thousands and thousands of snow geese in the distance. At first they looked like a white blur. There were enough birds remaining on the water to turn it white. The sheer numbers of birds here has been startling. Apparently we are on a migration corridor. Yesterday we saw a flock of black birds (maybe black only in silhouette, I am not sure) that stretched as far as we could see.

And the people here have been very friendly, and not the cloying false friendliness found especially in the South or the curious and/or desperate or rote friendliness of other places, but a simple sort of uncomplicated friendliness. And customer service has been amazing.

This came in handy last night around 3:30 am. We have been staying in pet-friendly accommodations, which is sometimes a decommissioned smoking room. This hasn't been a problem before because, apart from the faintest edge of an old smell which doesn't quite smell like it belongs, the rooms we've stayed in have been fine. Yesterday, we checked into a smellier room with its heater off. That should have been a hint. Adding heat unleashed potency; we then bought carpet Febreeze (we are in the US with a bewildering range of options), but before we applied it, we found the true culprit: the bed. Someone had smoked on it; there were even scorch marks on the cover. I gave up my pillow and then, after my eyes watered for two hours and my lungs started to feel irritated, I decided to sleep on the bathroom floor on towels. I can be sensitive to cig smoke so I figured I'd sleep a few hours and we'd sort things out tomorrow, get a fresh set of bedding and definitely test Carpet Febreeze on Mattress. Then my husband felt the same symptoms; he went down to notify the staff, and we got a new room! Somehow I'd assumed that there would be more discussing, or we'd be fobbed off to some other stinky room, but this new room is MUCH better and there's not a single hint of a cigarette. The furnishings are whiter, too...I hadn't realized that the old room was probably smoke stained. The old room also had ants, unlike this one. We'd bought and laid down ant traps; I wasn't going to fuss about a few bugs but not being able to sleep is a different matter! We finally went to sleep around four.

So, I didn't really feel much like running and my husband and I didn't have much energy, but we ran for an hour and, with walking breaks, covered about 6.7 miles. Total for me: 7.7ish miles.