About a week ago 
She found a site that had some interesting places to visit, so I picked one of them and then mapped out some other activities for us to do on the way back.
That's what led us to the Wadhams to Avoca Trail
This trail covers the 12 mile distance between the towns of Wadhams and Avoca Michigan (hence the name). It follows the route of an old rail line that was formerly owned by the famed CSX Company. As the website I mentioned above states, the highlight of the trail is the 640 foot long Mill Creek Trestle. It's an old bridge that spans the Mill Creek and has been converted to a walking trail.
After the nearly two hour drive, it was about 40 to 45 degrees F when we got to the parking lot at around 10 AM. Given the cold, we didn't attempt to walk the whole trail. Instead, we parked a little over a half mile away from the bridge and walked the distance across the bridge and back. It ended being about a mile and a half when we were finished.
The path is really well maintained and we came across a fair number of people enjoying it while we were on our walk.
Thankfully, by the time we got to the bridge, the foot traffic had cleared out quite a bit and we had an unobstructed opportunity for some photos. I'm not sure how tall the bridge is, but you can see from the opening photo, it isn't low. Despite the title of this post. I was referring more to the fact that we didn't get much of a fall this year. The leaves turned and fell within a day or two and at the end of this post you will see what came next.
My wife who is a licensed master social worker was impressed by the sign urging people to contact the suicide prevention and crisis helpline versus taking the plunge off the side of the bridge. Even with the fencing, it wouldn't be too hard to make an attempt if you really wanted to.
It would have been cool to wander through the brush down to the bottom of the bridge to get a shot from underneath, but it was cold and we needed to keep moving. The photo above that I got looking down is the best you get. It did offer some scenic views, and I can't help but think how pretty it must be in the summer when everything is green or in the fall when the colors on the trees are in full effect. Unfortunately, we got this kind of drab late fall blah, but I am still glad we made the visit.
Who knows, maybe we will come back again some day when the conditions are better.
After leaving the rail trail, we headed to the nearby town of Lapeer, MI to visit a small used bookstore called The Neverending Story. They had a huge selection, but many of the books were quite old. I was a bit at a loss about what to pick, so I didn't buy any books, but
There was a sweet old lady running the store and she was very nice if not a little chatty for my taste :)
I really enjoyed The Wheel of Time show on Amazon Prime before they cancelled it, but I have never read the books. I heard they are much better than the show, so I have been searching for some used copies to get started. I think there are something like 15 books in the series and I was kind of annoyed to find this place didn't have any of them except the last book...
We left Lapeer and headed to another nearby city called Davison to visit another book store. This one was called "Turn the Page" and while quite a bit smaller than the other one, they had a much better selection of newer books. They had the first book of the Wheel of Time, and the second book, so I got both of those, and
We stopped on got a quick lunch on our way home and pulled back into our driveway around 3:00 PM. We quickly worked together to get the leaves up off the front yard because we heard snow was coming later that day.
Sure enough, Sunday morning we woke up to this, the first snow of the 2025/2026 season. It continued to snow all day and if the ground hadn't been so warm and the temperatures had been a little colder I think we would have gotten a good six inches of accumulation. Thanks in part to a lake effect system that was sitting off the coast over Lake Huron. It was just churning away sending squall after squall of snow back over our area.
I expect by the end of the day today the majority of the snow will be long gone, but this likely isn't the last time we will see the white stuff this year. Despite the fact that we still have over a month left of Autumn, it feels like it is long gone already and we are already in the clutches of Winter.
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All pictures/screenshots taken by myself or
