A Hiking Story With Fairies

I killed more than half the day hiking on Wednesday. My group went to a park within a state forest. The park is also the site of some kind of kids' nature camp.
The guy who was leading the walk kept talking about the "fairy circles." He wanted to be sure that we hit the fairy circles before we left. I thought he meant those fairy rings you see on lawns. We do about five miles, stop for lunch, and he says that we'll finish up on the whatever trail so we can see the fairy circles. I'm thinking, These better be the best toadstool leavings I've ever seen in my life after all this.

As we're walking along, I'm telling one of my friends how I'd just received two books from a publisher and, wouldn't you know it, they were about fairies. I'm going on about how I'd gotten all excited when I saw the package only to be totally disappointed to find they were fairy books. "I hate fairies!"

I went on like that for a while.

All of a sudden, I notice the people ahead of me looking down at the ground. What they were looking at were arrangements of little buildings, painted rocks, little chairs made by nailing a piece of wood to a stump. Toys were artistically arranged. We saw little teepee-type structures built of saplings and things (a dreamcatcher, for instance) hanging from trees. And there were little signs indicating that we were walking through a fairy village.

The fairy circles went on for a ways and were adorable. The scene was totally unexpected even though someone had been talking for a couple of hours about how we had to see the fairy circles.

You can bet that somehow this will make its way into the 365 Story Project. So, see? Hiking wasn't a waste of time at all.

Training Report: I forgot to report yesterday, even though I had a pretty good day. I did two segments for the 365 Story Project, renewed my membership in Association of Booksellers for Children, and started revising a short story I want to submit. Today I did three Story Project segments and more on the short story. I'll have more to say about the short story another day.