Exploring Illinois

Greetings to all!  It's me, Mags!  As Ragnar told you, we had been in Illinois, visiting our grandmother.  It was awesome seeing her again.  In addition to visiting her, we did a lot of exploring in the little town she's in.  We were able to keep up with our "5 mile a morning" walk schedule AND got a few fun afternoon adventures in, too!  Here are just a few of the highlights ...

The very first night we got there, we explored the downtown area, which is where we were staying. Ragnar and I did our best to take it all in!

"Look, Ragnar!  A beautiful old church!"
"Oooh!  Pretty!"

We discovered lots of similarities between our town and Mascoutah, IL.  One such likeness is both towns' high schools are the Indians!  We even saw an Indian on a horse:

"I wonder what he's looking at, Mags."
"I think he's checking out the parking lot.  Maybe the football field ..."

They also have a park!  It's sort of a cross between CiCo and City Park here, but the COOLEST thing there was the SQUIRRELS!!!  Here we are in the park, with a kamikaze squirrel running right in front of us!!!

"SQUIRREL!!!"
"SQU--lookatthatthinggo--IRREL!!!"

They were amazingly fast!  And CRAZY!!!  They are smaller than our squirrels and are grey instead of red.  We found them fascinating!!!

We found a bike trail that sort of reminded us of Hudson Trail!

Me and Ragnar on the bike trail!

We even found a BRIDGE near the trail!

"Hey, look, Raggi!  A bridge!"
"BRIDGE!!!  Oh please, oh please, oh please!!!"

We weren't going that way, but Mom and Dad let us cross over it and back anyway just because ... you know.  Ragnar ❤ bridges!

There were frequently other people out enjoying walks, so we were polite and would pull over to the side and stop.  

"Hi.  I'm Ragnar Jimmysson!"
"And I'm Margaret Thatcher."

We tried our hardest to be good ambassadors from the great state of Kansas and good ambassadors of our breed.  Mom and Dad said we did an awesome job of both.

More adventures to come!  Stay tuned -- and thanks for the warm welcome back!

Yours sincerely,

Margaret Thatcher