O is for Outdoors

 or Is It Out-of-Doors

Outdoors, out-of-doors, or outside. I never really thought about the differences among those words until now, when I was thinking about an O post. Upon further investigation, I figured out that outside is a noun while outdoors and out-of-doors are synonyms for adverbs of place. Makes sense when I think about the context in which they're used. Now the next question. If we say out-of-doors, why don't we say in-of-doors? The answer for that will just have to wait until another time. For now, here are a few pictures of a recent hike that I took with Ward and Wally out-of-doors.

The trail began along these rocks.

Then it went down a hill where we hiked along a river for a while.

And along railroad tracks. The trail went back up the hill before we went through the tunnel.

The woods were mostly gray, but we did see some color like this old forsythia hedge
at the edge of a clearing.

Yellow was the color of the day. Not only did we see the forsythia, we saw frequent clumps of this yellow wildflower,

And ever-tenacious dandelions popping up here and there.