Photo Friday: Plastic.

For Photo Friday: Plastic. I'm used to seeing trails on the East Coast marked with a blob of a certain color spray paint on trees. When I was a Boy Scout, the trails at our camp where called by their colors, not by where they led or began or meandered. The Blue Trail was where we went to smoke, so-called because of the color on the trees. It was not called the Behind the Pool Trail by anyone. I have not been there since my last year of college, but I believe that the C & O Canal trail in the Maryland mountains is marked with stumpy foot-high mile-markers that are colored a sort of dirty sangria red. Don't walk into one of those. Or try to sit on one. Some of the trails at Giant City State Park here in Illinois have these high-tech and flexible plastic trail markers, thus the photo. Do they have the elasticity to, say, throw a rock like a catapult at your old college roommate who is town for a visit? No, I tried. They are soft on the recoil. I suppose that's so that they won't knock you in your fellas if the person in front of you pulls it down on their way by, like a thorn bush to the groin. Safety first and all that. (Enlarge the photo to see a nice couple in the background.)