ConAgra Park

I think this blog may be more of a weekend thing for a while, as very little post-worthy happens during the week it seems. On that note, this weekend was rather full:

Hit the Old Market farmers market
Finally managed to see the Con Agra park in the daylight
Bought Bikes
Rode ~10 miles on the local trails
Cooked something like 44 servings of food
baby sat for Heather’s cousin

In the expanded view:

The farmers market, every Saturday for the rest of the summer in Omaha’s old market area, was surprisingly active. I was expecting a bit of a slow start considering there aren’t many vegetables ready to eat yet. As it turns out, there were a lot of people selling green onions, green garlic, asparagus, and hothouse tomatoes. Also there were fresh bread and summer sausage type vendors as well. they easily managed to 100% fill the little quarter-block area setup for the market. Heather and I purchased a few things, most notably some amazing multi grain bread. After some time gawking at the different things in the market, we headed a few blocks over to the park.

ConAgra park was beautiful! Heather and I have had the pleasure of walking through the part of the park that is always open during the twilight / dark part of the evening, but never before have we been there during the day. The fountian isn’t quite as amazing in the daylight, lacking its colored lighting effects, but the park itself is really pleasant. The half of the walkway that is on the ConAgra campus was open, so we got to see that area for the first time as well. We spent quite a while setting on a bench beside the lake, watching the fountain and enjoying a beautiful morning.

Once we left the park we headed back to the apartment for a quick lunch, and then headed out to Bike Masters, a bike shop recommended by my uncle Bill. They were really helpful, and had Heather and I both riding around the parking lot trying out a few different bikes. Sadly I was so occupied trying out the bikes I forgot to get any pictures, but you will just have to take my word for it. We had a lot of fun with that, and finally settled on a bike that each of us liked. Or rather we each found one that we were happy with, we didn’t get matching bikes. I then discovered that my Escape is kind of small inside, and ended up having to make two trips to haul the bikes home, but the shop was only a few minutes away from our apartment.

After hauling the bikes home, and changing into somewhat more appropriate clothing, we headed out to give our new bikes a try! The “Big Papio Trail” runs within a few blocks of our apartment, so we headed to intersect it. Riding on the trail was wonderful, we rode for miles without even noticing the distance we covered. I checked a map later, and we went out about five miles before we stopped in a little park near Center street. The ride back was slightly uphill, and into a slight breeze, making it somewhat more noticeable. It wasn’t painful though, our pace just wasn’t quite as fast.

Sunday, after church, Bethany came over for lunch. I grilled chicken, and we sort of broiled some sliced red potatoes. Counting what we ate at lunch, and what we froze there were ten servings of that meal. We did a large portion by choice just to replenish our stock of quick lunch items. We have been meaning to do a better job of pre-planning the weeks food, and actually got to it this time. Heather and I made up a shopping list, hit the store, and then proceeded to make a pan of enchiladas, a pan of lasagna (we didn’t bake that until Monday) and a big pot of vegetable soup. Needless to say our freezer is very full right now, but we have a variety of lunch options ready to just grab and go for a few weeks.

Baby sitting was interesting, in part because it came at the end of a rather long weekend, and in part because our charge can now walk. He’s still not what you would consider confident on his legs, but being able to pick what part of the house to be in certainly changed how he interacts with the baby sitters. By 8:30pm we had him all changed and put to bed, by 9:00 pm Heather was out cold on the couch. I put a major dent in my book before we were relieved, and I guess did a good job of keeping an eye on the house while everyone else slept? 🙂

I don’t know if we can fill every weekend quite this full, but I think we did a pretty solid job this time around!

-Jordan

Sunday night Heather and I decided to go for a walk, as we seem to be running a surplus of amazingly nice fall weekends right now.

Unfortunately, we were a little slow getting left to go for a walk and it was getting dark, making the neighborhood we were going to walk in sort of a bad choice. Our hastily composed plan ‘b’ was to head downtown to investigate the walking bridge over the Missouri river that we had heard people talk about.

Our first problem was we had no idea where the bridge actually was. The only directions we could remember was that you “can get to it from the ConAgra park.” About half the park is closed at night, so we walked a long ways around the park, going the wrong way hoping to find an open gate. We could see people walking along the path across the main lake, so we were pretty sure there was some way in. After giving up on our initial search, we saw the bridge peaking through the trees! The only problem was we had been walking in completely the wrong direction for over 10 minutes, and the bridge looked to be about 4 miles away. We also had no idea how to get to it still.

We walked across a few streets, under some bridges, and across a set of railroad tracks, finally getting ourselves onto the proper path to get to the bridge. From the path we could see that none of the obstacles mentioned in the preceding sentence were necessary, as there was a cool raised walkway that let you hop straight from the open half of the ConAgra park onto the path we were now standing on. I would recommend using the raised path after dark, our path was a little sketchy, and lacked sidewalks for about half the way.

All that got us only part of the way to the bridge, but at least we could really see it at this point. Sadly we didn’t bring a camera, so you are on your own to find out what the bridge looks like, but it is fairly cool in the dark. we walked across the bridge, discovered that you cant see much looking off the bridge in the dark, and that there isn’t anything on the Iowa side right now.

Heading back we found, for the second time that night, that the view retracing our steps was a lot better than it had been going out. You get a rather amazing view of the Omaha downtown at night when walking back from the Iowa side of the bridge.

Before heading home we spent a few minutes setting in the dark watching the big fountain in the lake at the middle of the ConAgra park. It made for the perfect way to end the evening.

you really can’t complain about having a day that broke 60 degrees, was as beautiful as Sunday was, and that you could set on a parkbench without a coat on, when it comes this late in October. I just hope this is a sign of weather to come, and we aren’t using up all our unusually temperate days before the wedding. It would be nice to get one of those freak 50-degree-plus days January 24th 2009 😉

-Jordan

Bikes And Food!

The Pedestrian Bridge