A little book hike

Today, I took the girls down to Powder Mills Park in Pittsford, to hike along Irondequoit Creek.

In the book that I'm writing with lots of input from Madison, this is where most of the action takes place. We haven't been to that part of the park in a while, certainly not since we started this project. So it was rather exciting for her: She got to settle, in her own mind, just exactly where everything takes place: which beaver dam traps the mysterious treasure chest, which property that borders the park could be the Haworths', etc. The Frontier Team detectives use a satellite map and images of the area to work out some logic about where the treasure chest may have originally been buried. We went through the same process, yesterday, and today we brought the satellite photo printout and referred to it as we were hiking. Ella was very interested in transferring the layout she could see from the ground into an image from the sky.

So now, as we go through endless editing, Madison (and I!) will have some great mental pictures of the actual setting. She was enraptured with the idea that maybe, after the book is published, other kids would walk that trail "just as we are, right now, Mom," to see where it all "happens."