Up the Mountain We Go...

(To the tune of "To Grandmother's House We Go," obviously.)

Sunday afternoon was interesting.

Interesting being the most positive adjective I could possibly choose to describe it. Unfortunately, I’m not really kidding.

It all began in the morning when we decided to plan an adventure. Our plan was to enjoy what, at the time, appeared to be a partially sunny day by going for a hike. The plan was to climb a local mountain (though the term “mountain” might be an exaggeration… it usually takes about 40 minutes to make it to the top). The plan was to treat ourselves to a green juice refuel (serving the duel-purpose of cleansing our systems from Saturday night’s greasy ate-too-much meal) as we did our weekly grocery shopping post-hike. Well, you know what they say about plans… We seriously got laughed at on this one.

To start with, by the time we left the apartment for our Sunday adventure, the slight amount of sun that had been present in the morning had managed to disappear. No worries. We’re in shorts. It’s a little chilly. No problem though… We’ll definitely warm up once we start hiking.

And right in the middle of that thought is about when it started to rain. Whatever. We’re tough (haha). We’re from the West Coast. A little bit of rain won’t slow us down. We continue to delude ourselves (the clouds seem to be getting darker…) as we embark on the drive to pick up my brother (AKA our hiking hostage).

First sign of things to come; the brother is wearing jeans. Who wears jeans for a hike? The boyfriend joked that we shouldn’t even let him in the car. I secretly thought maybe jeans were the right idea. My legs were already freezing. And take my word for it; Goosebumps, pale winter legs, and short running shorts are not exactly the most attractive look.

Moving on.

The next portion of the story is where things start to look up. Someone was clearly teasing us. The rain appeared to have stopped, or the trees above us were taking the brunt of it. Either way, we were dry. So sure, the trail was still quite muddy… And no one else there seemed to be wearing shorts (we must have missed the hiking in comfy-looking knit sweaters memo…). But it has stopped raining, and when you have curly hair like mine, that’s really the best you can ask for. Seriously. Going out in the rain is one of my worst fears. No lie.

It would be great to end the story there with a happy ending still in sight. It can easily be imagined from here that it got sunny, we made it to the top (mountain conquered!), and then enjoyed some yummy, well-deserved, over-priced fruit drinks... Yeah... Not so much.

Instead, right about as we reached a height on the trail where we actually had a semi-decent view of the ocean below, the boyfriend had a major slip. He fell on his hip and scraped up his elbow and arm really badly. And being the well-prepared hikers that we obviously are… No band-aids. So that was kind of the end of our adventure.

But only kind of. Because, on the way down, I started to smell something gross (I won’t elaborate on this for your sakes). I continued to smell this unpleasant aroma when we got in the car. Ewww. It was pretty clear at this point that someone had stepped in dog poo. Boo. (Side note: Rhyming is awesome!) After performing a mandatory shoe-bottom sniff (bad visual, I know) and a highly dramatized freak-out about the car upholstery (not by the boyfriend, of course), we got that mess (literally) sorted out.

And then we went home to regroup (or mope?). Without our yummy juice. Without groceries.

We’re telling ourselves that at least we didn’t turn around because we couldn’t physically make it up the mountain after a winter of relative inactivity… And we actually feel slightly, slightly better thinking of that.

So that’s how my Sunday went down. Did you get up to anything interesting? The sun keeps tricking me into thinking that summer temperatures are here… They’re not. Anyone else get into any mini-battles with spring?

XOXO Ely

P.S. - The injury turned out to not be too bad (just a few scrapes and bruises) so you can bet we’ll have another attempt soon. And in the meantime, you can bet we're laughing about this one!