Shouldless Days: October

We are moving into the final quarter of the year, and as I've moved through the year, I've noticed that planning a "shouldless day" easily slips my mind and I end up feeling like I have to cram it in at the end of the month. So this month I decided to plan a shouldless day early in the month and I set aside this past Sunday. Here's how I filled the day!

I woke up without an alarm and had some coffee and oatmeal before heading out to meet 3 girlfriends at a local farmer's market. I usually go with my friend Courtney, but 2 other friends joined us this week which made it extra fun. I didn't take any pictures, but I sure brought home quite the haul - 3 different kinds of squash, a big bag of apple "2nds" (apples with some marks on them that still taste great!), some ground lamb and zucchini that I plan to use in this recipe that my friend Alli has raved about, a dozen farm-fresh eggs and some baked goods (a cinnamon roll and pumpkin bar) from a gluten free bakery.

After that, I headed home, loaded up my bike, and drove downtown to meet up with my friend Amber for a long bike ride on a new-to-us trail. We biked about 19 miles out to a cute town called Excelsior which is on the shore of a large lake called Lake Minnetonka. The first 8 miles of the trail were paved and then after that we biked along a tree-lined packed limestone trail. It was an absolutely beautiful fall day as the temperatures were in the low 70s and it was very sunny. We recently had a long stretch of cool, rainy weather so I was so thrilled that we had such nice weather for our bike ride!

Since it's been so rainy here lately, our leaves haven't changed as much as they normally would at this point, but we still saw some peaks of fall colors.

We stopped for lunch at a Mexican place in Excelsior as tacos and chips + guac sounded soooo good.  After refueling, we headed back home. When it was all said and done, we had biked just shy of 38 miles. My legs and booty were so glad to get off my bike!

When I got home, I walked into a house that smelled amazing as I had assembled this crockpot lentil stew recipe the day before and had popped it into the crockpot before leaving for my bike ride.

All I had to do was add the kale, parsley, and olive oil and it was ready to go.  I was still pretty full from the Mexican food so I let it simmer for awhile and laid down on the couch to read for awhile. Except the moment I laid down, Oscar jumped up on my chest for some cuddles. She doesn't do this very often so I held off on reading so I could focus on petting our sweet girl.

Once she had enough attention, I read a little bit of my latest read, The Expatriates, which I am really enjoying!

Then I enjoyed some soup with freshly-grated parmesan. I am trying to limit my dairy intake as I know my stomach is sensitive to it, but I could resist the salty goodness of parmesan on my soup!

While I ate dinner, I watched last week's episode of This is Us on my laptop.  I am really enjoying this show and am happy to hear that it's moving to 8pm CST. It was on at 9pm before and that's a bit too late for this granny!  Maybe I will actually be able to watch it live going forward!

After I finished that show, Phil got home from his mom's so we caught up on our days, watched the last episode of season 1 of Bloodline, and then it was off to bed!  I was definitely tired and ready for bed thanks to all the fresh air I got during the day!

What is the weather like in your neck of the woods?