(This is so cool, I think. The leaves were falling from trees along Lake Bemidji and getting stuck in the fence surrounding the football field and track.)

Really, the title of this blog should be The Case of the Missing Keys, but that is too boring a lede. And an "insecure pocket" is appropriate because, well, that’s where the keys apparently fell from.

A little background: Today, Laurie and I celebrated the return to our trail! But what should have been a happy day turned into a bit of a nightmare. (And, yes, I’m being melodramatic.) It wasn’t so much of a nightmare as much as a really, really, really, really long walk.

Laurie and I walk from the heart of downtown, along Third Street, to Paul and Babe and then cut down along the lakeshore to the dirt trail, to Bemidji State University through Diamond Point Park and back. In all, it’s about 3 miles. And we do it in about an hour flat.

Except today.

We start and end at Laurie’s house. Which means before we leave, I put my purse in her house, she locks the door and we go. We get back, unlock the door, I get my purse and I go back to work.

Except today.

this afternoon, after our hour-long walk, we returned to Laurie’s house, she reached into her pocket, and then another pocket, and then a third pocket, and looked at me.

Today’s quote, from Laurie: "Shoot!"

(OK, that wasn’t really what she said, she said something somewhat similar, but I don’t want to have to bleep out our own blog.)

Yep, the keys were gone.

So what to do, what to do. We’re fairly resourceful people, so we walked from her place to a different building downtown that manages her apartment complex. Here, we picked up a spare key. Then, we went back to Laurie’s house and planned our next moves.

We ultimately decided to take my car and drive to locations along our trail where the keys would have been most likely to have fallen.

Earlier, we had decided to rough it and see if we could follow the fenced-in paved trail to the opening at the BSU campus.

The following photo illustrates where the fence begins/ends (depending on your point of view). We walked along the lakeshore and cut up to meet up with the trail right at the fence line.
 

But it was not an easy walk along the lakeshore. There really isn’t a trail there, so we were kind of trudging through some mud and walking on a sloped hill. Neither of us fell, but we sure slipped and slid around a little bit along the way. So it was a bumpy walk.

So this was the area we narrowed in on in our search for the missing keys.

We went to the "surfing hill" – which was where we kind of took turns half-falling, half-gliding down the hillside:

No keys.

We walked along the entire lakeshore where the new trail was at. No keys.

We went back to the 10th Street stairs, where Laurie had jumped the wall. No keys.

We checked the area where she found a hiking stick. No keys.

And then, when we ran out of ideas, we returned to this location.

The split, as we call it. Laurie heads down to hop around a hole in the ground. The area freaks me out, because, well, I’m a klutz, and I don’t want to fall into Lake Bemidji. So I take the "high road" – or a secondary trail that goes above the lakeshore.

And … sure enough, the keys were resting safety beside the hole on a ledge.

A few more inches to the left and they would be drowning in Lake Bemidji.

But we found them. Two hours and a few miles after we first left Laurie’s house.

So that was our day today. A memorable walk, that’s for sure.

***

The following is our How Well Do You Know Bemidji? submission:

Yesterday’s answer is that it was a photo of the U.S. Postal seal. (I don’t know if that is the correct name or title of the image, but you get the idea. I’m way too tired to look it up.)

Here’s hoping for a more relaxing evening than I had this afternoon!

- Bethany