Yesterday was my one weekday off from classes before starting the summer session, and the weather was supposed to be amazing, so Sara and I decided to do something awesome and go canoeing. Canoeing was the first order of business, and despite getting lost on the way there (I stupidly got the address of the canoe livery from a list of liveries instead of their own website), got off at about 10 on the Driftwood River near Columbus, IN. The water was high and pleasantly fast, with some points of moderate excitement, and was fairly pretty. Here's where we stopped for lunch:



And here's Sara after 8 miles of canoeing:



And here's where Sara insisted on taking a picture of me in an uncomfortable tree trunk:



Then, since it was only about 2, we decided to make it a *really* special date and head to the City of Love, also known as Columbus, Indiana. Columbus, despite its heavily-accented population of 39,000, was apparently ranked 6th in the nation in architectural innovation and design in a list which included NY, Chicago, Boston, and many other much bigger cities. It's kind of baffling that a city with this honor would be located in the middle of Southern Indiana, especially considering that most of the locals we talked to could not really have been called by any stretch of the imagination "highly cultured." But then, it's also kind of baffling that one of the world's greatest music schools is also in the middle of Southern Indiana. So we went on a self-guided walking tour, starting from the 19th-century Visitors' Center. Here's Sara within a Henry Moore sculpture, in front of a striking church:



And me in front of the veteran's memorial and courthouse:



There were more striking buildings than these, including a lookout tower, covered bridge, and some stranger churches, but these were the best places for pictures.

Finally, after our walking tour, we were pretty tired, so we went out to Bistro 210 for an altogether too expensive but really excellent dinner, then headed back to Bloomington. About ten minutes from Bloomington I remembered that I had rehearsal for Voces Novae in about 25 minutes.

I had no trouble getting to sleep last night! But it was a really fun day, and it was great to spend virtually all of it outside. The whole time we were canoeing, the weather could only have been described as perfect--it wasn't too cool or hot at *all*, and we were even comfortable wearing our life preservers the whole time. The whole thing was definitely terrific.