Autumn thrills and chills :)

Autumn is all over the place and it feels absolutely marvellous :). Its as if the whole place is an enormous canvas and God, like a child, has taken brush after brush and painted strokes of yellows, oranges, pinks, reds and maroons. Looks like He doesn't like any green around, so He's covering it up with all sorts of vibrant colours :). Each direction you turn, there's a new colour. Your eyes can't see enough, your memory can't record enough. And I can't take enough pictures ;-).

Kentucky is one of the states that change their colours once fall sets in. Just about 2 weeks back, everything was still green. I remember cribbing to Sri on what's-the-big-deal-about-fall-cause-I-don't-see-any-changes thing :). Miraculously, the whole surroundings and the weather has changed in days and if you ask me, the whole change is absolutely lovely. Just go on a drive and you'll be awestruck by the colours. Heck!! Why drive!! My apartment complex trees have also changed in a way that makes me wonder whether these were the same trees that I saw about a week ago. Maybe somebody took out the old ones and replanted new ones overnight :-p. This is not a joke, it actually happened at Sri's office once when they renovated the surroundings. One day there were plants and over the weekend there were trees!! Hehehe :).

I remember in India, autumn means leaves fall off. There are colours there too, but those are basically of flowers which remain on trees while the leaves fall off. So the trees are full of flowers with no leaves to be seen. I have seen purple, pink and yellow flowers which look lovely. But here, surprisingly there are no flowers. None at all!! Its as if the flowers got jealous of the leaves' colours and left the trees, huffing in anger :). Me and my imagination :).

The poem on the previous post was inspired by the change of colours in our apartment complex. I wrote it last week, but posted it this week only because of the lengthy Atlanta post ;-). But on the weekend, we got to see so much more of Kentucky autumn that yup, it deserved a special post on its own. The poem just didn't do what we saw justice. Actually it didn't do autumn any justice at all :-p :-D. We drove to Blue Licks Battlefield state park which is just about 40 min away from Lexington, not for history sake, but for the colours.




And man!! Was it worth it or what!! The drive itself satisfied our craving. We both were like kids pointing out candy!! "Look at that lovely yellow there" I said, "The small red trees over there are beautiful" said Sri, and this continued all the way till we reached the park :). The park was also looking extremely lovely with a palette of colours.

We walked to a small lookout to see the hills covered by various shades, later to a bridge to see an awesome view of a road and much later to a small lake which was surrounded with colourful foliage :). The sun was playing peek-a-boo with us and whenever it came out, the sights were worth capturing in a snap. Here's another photo:




We never actually saw any historical places on the park. We were busy admiring the handwork of God, which I should say is much better than man made building anyways. But I did climb on to a swing in the playground there and swung like I used to way back in childhood :). Also, we did try our hands at a 18-hole mini golf. A mini golf has 18 holes, but its not a huge golf course. It has small distance holes with some fun stuff like a house standing in between the path with a hole in the bottom. You have to make the golf ball go through the house to reach the actual hole :). I was a bit nervous in the beginning, but there were no people there except a family which was way ahead of us. So said "What the heck!!" and went for it :-D.






Hehehe. Sri claimed to be Tiger Woods, but most of his shots went outside the course. So I teased him saying "Yup you are Tiger Woods, when he didn't know what golf was" :-D. I got one of the holes in my first shot which was an absolute beginner's luck scenario. We shouted all the time for every shot, boo-d each other and gave hi-fives. Had royal fun throughout. At one point, we actually did wonder what these Americans would have thought had they heard us shouting, maybe "These Indians are crazy!!" - Asterix style :)). Anyways, later had fries, apple pies and sundae (yup I'm crazy enough to have a hot fudge sundae in cold weather, while Sri had a coffee) in McDonalds and set off home.

Autumn is all fun and beautiful but the weather is getting colder and colder day by day!! Its about 2 to 5 degree celsius daily now and we really can't venture out without getting decked in some kind of coats and caps. Anytime of the day I go out, I can see my breath like smoke. Just a moment out in the chilly weather, my hands, nose and ears freeze :(. If autumn is like this, I don't even want to wonder what winter will be like!!! We have to keep the heater continuously on in the house already!! So, the moral of the story, my dear friends is, "Autumn thrills, but chills!!" :).