Where Ya Goin' For Lunch?

This week, I'm at training. This means I'm working with adults. They are interesting creatures. I'm not sure if they are all that different from the 7th graders I teach ... except they don't have quite the energy and "joi de vie" of the middle schoolers.

We are building a leadership team and working through our different visions and opinions, but they are good people who care about kids and I see us jelling as the days go by.

This is not a post about team building tho.

It's a post about lunch.

If you teach, your lunch break lasts about 25 minutes. There is no lunch "hour". That changes when we go to training as there are breaks and A WHOLE HOUR FOR LUNCH!

Who could imagine such things existed?

Yesterday, as lunch time rolled around, the usual questions started, " Watcha doin' for lunch? Can I ride with you? Where do y'all want to go?"

There are not many options in the tiny town I teach in. There's about 4 tiny restaurants and none of them are good at managing lunch time surges.

I had my whole grain bagel with peanut butter, a blackberry yogurt, and a banana in the JEEP so I passed on lunch invitations and headed for Devils Hammock Wildlife Management Area just a few miles away.

I knew that even with an HOUR, I couldn't go too deep into the park, so I pulled the JEEP over as soon as I found a roadside ditch with water in it. Most of the park is bone dry and my best chance of seeing life at noon was going to be at a water hole.

I figured I'd have to settle for some insects on pickeral weed shots, but you never know. It was too smoky from raging regional wildfires to do bird photos, so my attention was down not up.

I photographed some duck potato, pickeral weed, almost ripe blackberries, and then as I crouched down for a pickeral weed closeup ... a chorus of grunting started up and there were some little splashes to my right.

Four gator pups came cruising out of the cattail shade and into the sunlight, all the while calling for Momma. They were about as cute as a reptile could ever hope to be and I spent my lunch HOUR watching their antics.

I was a few minutes late returning to training.

When I walked in, the trainer was lecturing and my cohorts were all hunched over take out boxes trying to wolf down their lunch.

They had spent the entire lunch hour driving and waiting for the overloaded little restaurants to produce their orders.

"What did you do for lunch?" my pal asked, between bites of cheese pizza.

"Oh nothing, just brown bagged it."

Yes, I kept an eye on Momma while I enjoyed her pups.