Outdoor Escapades

This weekend was a pleasant one for being out and about.

On Saturday, I went with Gandalf and Boromir up to the Exploration Trail just above our house in Arrowbear. I've talked about it before—it's a great four-mile trail that wends from the highway up to the Children's Forest just by the Keller Peak Fire Lookout. It feels surprisingly isolated and climbs up through a couple of climate zones. We couldn't make it all the way to the top because some rather large patches of ice-crusted snow were still drifted over the trail at the high end. Would that I had an ice axe! It would have been a perfect time to learn how to glissade and all about self-arrest. (Gandalf is wise in such things.) As it was, it started getting a bit hairy, and none of us really wanted a ride to the canyon floor. But it was a good workout, and I got to identify a few new trees (limber and Coulter pines). I wasn't even aware how much I had missed being out on the trail; now I just have to find a way to do it many more times in the near future.

On Sunday, we went down to a park in Highland to meet up with my grandparents on my mother's side. It was broiling hot (Summer officially starts in the Inland Empire on April 12th; it'll probably end sometime in early November. This is among the several reasons I want to flee.), but we took all the bikes and the boys were happy for the chance to ride on flat-ish trails. It was the first real riding either Joanna or I had done on the bikes handed down to us by her sister's family. It has been too long and the riding still felt odd, but it was fun. Of course, if we're going to do much more of that, we really need a bike rack; as it was, we had to take two cars, the Subaru loaded down with nothing but bicycles, and one leftover cycle in the minivan.

My folks also brought a couple of kid-sized bats and whiffle balls, so we practiced batting with the boys a bit. Some strange memories about little league came floating back, but we all enjoyed it. My dad taught the boys to make "angry faces" to intimidate the pitcher, and I think that helped them the most. That, and saying, "Grrr!" just before swinging.