PechaKucha and our scouting Kank-speed-ition

Back on May 14th, we participated in a PechaKucha Night hosted by PechaKucha St. Joseph/Benton Harbor. PechaKucha Nights are informal and fun gatherings where creative people get together and share their ideas, works, thoughts, holiday snaps -- just about anything, really. The platform originated in Tokyo and you can now find PechaKucha events in over 700 cities around the world. We are excited to see such an awesome concept take place close to home! 

The event was held at The Livery, a local microbrewery that used to be a livery stable for horses. The location was fun and the crowd was lively! There were 9 presenters throughout the evening, each presenting in true PechaKucha fashion - a simple presentation format where you show 20 images, each for 20 seconds. The images advance automatically and you talk along to the images. This took a lot of pre-planning for the presenters to get their talks to run smoothly in the miniscule amount of allotted time...

20 slides each projected on the screen for only 20 seconds!

It was harder that expected to tell our whole story in 6 minutes and 40 seconds. We kept the audience on the edge of their seats!

All of the evenings presenters. Each talk will eventually be found online at pechakucha.org!

Mary does awkward showcase pointing part-time if you're looking to hire. Thank you for organizing such a unique and community oriented event!

What could Amy possibly be doing? Looking for morels of course! We took some adventure hikes throughout northwest Indiana to see if we could find any of these elusive, delicious, springtime mushrooms.

Found one!

Found two! Found three!

Another recent adventure day took us south of Lake Michigan to the Kankakee River. No Makeba this time, just an old beat up Coleman canoe! We had been planning a paddling expedition for the entire length of the river - 133 miles - over the span of a few days. The Kankakee River National Water Trail is in the works, creating a designated national water trail from the headwaters near South Bend, Indiana, to where the Kankakee joins the Des Plaines River in Illinois. Plans fell through for the week we were planning on, but we still had one free day in our schedules so we decided to take one long paddling day to see how far we could make it.

This day turned into our scouting day for the possible full length river expedition someday. Our aim was to put in at the English Lake access point by the Yellow River and take out at the State Line bridge on the Indiana/Illinois border. This route would take us over 47 miles - we had to keep a pretty steady pace throughout the entire day to finish this kind of mileage!

We called this expedition day the Kank-speed-ition. We're pretty good at coming up with names if I do say so myself.

Look what Amy found - a completely intact deer skull with antlers on the bank of the river.

And look what else we found...can you see them?

Just passed Dunn's bridge we saw a Great Blue Heron fly high up into a tree. As we looked and listened closer we realized what we were looking at...about 14 Blue Heron nests with at least 1-2 Blue Herons sitting on each nest!

The area was loud with chirping baby Blue Herons! I wonder how many were truly up there.

One more baby bird for the day. As we stopped paddling for lunch, we soon found ourselves drifting in the current past a struggling baby bird. This little guy must have fallen out of his nest that was precariously made on a branch above the river - we quickly paddled over and Amy gently scooped him up on her paddle.

Little guy was completely tuckered out.

We named him Young Bean, before placing him in a safe spot to rest and dry off on the side of the river.

Hmm, now where are we...27 miles by lunch, only 20 more to go!

 
Just a quick awkward nap and a quick awkward stretch...

We made it - 47 mile Kand-speed-ition day completed in about 10 hours on the water :)