On a sunny, warm November day, my class went on an expedition to Nickerson Lake. We pulled into my grandparent’s driveway and saw the sun reflecting off the lake like a mirror. My grandmother surprised us by giving us each a pumpkin chocolate chip cupcake.
As soon as we finished eating, my classmates and I hiked up the driveway and into the dooryard of the Putnam’s small farm. We noticed a beautiful flower garden and a long one-story blue house. Farther down the trail, we saw two wooden chicken pens. There were about fifteen brown, black, and white chickens, pecking, clucking, and digging at the ground determined to find worms as a runner is determined to win a race.
Walking down the dirt road, I watched beautiful red and brown leaves flying through the air. The crescent-shaped lake gleamed in the sunshine. We stepped onto soft, green grass and then stopped to catch up with each other. Mrs. Oliver, my teacher, glanced at the lake and said, “This is a cove.” We admired how the cove was calm and still.
After, we brushed aside green branches and crossed a series of connected brown wooden bridges covered with neon green carpet. As we continued hiking, we spotted trees with leaves fluttering down like airplanes hit by lightning. After watching the leaves flying through the air, we darted around and tried to catch the leaves before they touched the ground.
We walked down the trail and arrived at Crescent Park. We saw the bright yellow sun up in the clouds as we ran across neatly mowed green grass down to a rocky shore to touch the freezing, cold lake water. We sat at the picnic tables with our writer’s notebooks and wrote about what we had seen, heard, smelled, touched and tasted.
After about ten minutes of writing, we packed up our notebooks and headed back towards my grandparent’s house. On the way, we stopped at the Inman’s camp. They have a little village they built for their grandchildren. There was a wooden fort with a huge yellow slide at the top and a double story tree house with a ladder leading to the second floor. There was a tree with a lot of different kinds of bottles and a wooden bridge that led to a wharf looking out onto the lake.
After taking pictures, we walked back down the old, wooden pathway and pushed through prickly pine needles to get back onto our trail. When we returned back to my grandparent’s house, we were greeted with pumpkin chocolate chip cupcakes with whipped cream frosting and homemade chocolate chip cookies. As we devoured the food, we talked about our field trip. Trying to be on time for recess and lunch, we squeezed back into the big white Chevy pickup and returned to school. I looked out the window as we pulled out of the driveway amazed by Nature’s beauty.
