Else what's a heaven for?

My mother had an excellent bbq for her baby brother's visit home. Yaay meat cooked outdoors! My cousin is at that adorable stage when you can watch linguistics at work and she occasionally responds to reason. I ate scary quantities of meat and napped under a tree for two hours. There was something so Jazz Age about the whole weekend: I woke to saxophone music drifting over from a neighbor's yard and small planes flying overhead. We walked down the street to the dead end, which I apparently haven't done in at least 10 years, bc there are new houses and some of the owners put up hilariously pompous fences. Which would be perfect for vaulting, if I thought the owners had a sense of humor. Oh, and then there was taiko drumming coming from a neighbors' yard. Weird.

Two years ago, I went for a little hike with my parents. I picked the route from a guide to local hikes my mum bought at the Audubon and made her pack water and food and rain gear and warm clothes and all that other stuff into the pack. Then we drove through NY state to the trailhead and we did the whole thing in about 2 hours, which wasn't nearly enough time to get hungry. oops. On the plus side, the trailed smelled fantastic, as it ran through an old growth forest, and ever since, I've been on the lookout for such.

Bc of that hike, I've been interested in doing the Mianus River Gorge hike, which I've been seeing in guidebooks since I started training for Kili. It's an old growth forest, about a half hour from my parents' house, driving through Stamford. Since the PT god said I could only do "50%" of my usual, it seemed like a good day to try. When we left their house, my dad mumbled something about how he'd done it before and so had I, but of course I didn't realize what he meant. *hand-slap-forehead* Yeah, it was the same one.

Unfortunately, bc I wasn't allowed to carry weight, we had no food and I got hungry - y'all know how well I deal with hunger. And my father had a much rougher time and didn't make it to the end of the out-and-back. He actually spent the rest of the afternoon complaining that he would never ever do that again :( There were fewer insects, but it didn't smell primeval this time :( On the other hand, I raced up and down the few uphill sections and got my hr up to 177 at one point; average was 118 :S

Then TRQ paid a visit to my parents' house and brought me food!!! Good company and home cooked spare ribs FTW!!!