Weekend Wrap

The weather this past weekend was even better than a fortnight (2 weeks, yes, some Americans ask what a fortnight is) ago, with sunny skies on both Saturday and Sunday and temperatures skyrocketing into the low 50s (12 - 14 celsius). Not wanting to miss a chance to spend some time outside after such a long time in indoor hibernation, we decided to go for a hike at a place we had never been before. Liz looked some places up and found Huntington State Park.

The park itself is in Redding, which is around 40 minutes drive from our apartment in Stamford. Redding sound familiar? It's where the farm is that we get our pumpkins and Christmas trees from. Huntington is around 800 acres and has several miles of hiking trails. Pulling up to the park on the opposite side from the main gates, we put on our hiking shoes and checked out the trail map. We found a loop and decided we would do that. The trails are marked with colors on the trees (called blazes) so that people know where to go. We decided to go blue, yellow, green, yellow, white then blue, which would give us a nice walk and loop back to the car. Figuring we would never remember that order/path (they were all right turns btw, except the turn onto white, which was left), Liz went to get paper and a pen. When she came back I said "Buy your groceries, you wily bastard!" Liz's response was "What?!", and I told her it again, and then noted blue, yellow, green, yellow, white, blue. Shaking her head she wrote it down anyway. While she was writing it down I came up with another little saying. It's not safe to write it online though. No-one puts bad words on the Internet.

We set off, me quoting my dirty saying, Liz shaking her head. Then, loudness! 2 horses (or ponies, not sure how big they were) steamed past us, with their rider encouraging them to go faster. We then passed another 2, slower moving, horse creatures, and thought about the dangers of what we were embarking on. Where there are horses, surely there is horse poo. Luckily, the first time, the horse poo gave us a 10 yard warning that it was there. But the not-so-fresh stuff would sneak up on us.

Following our blue trail, we came to the first intersection. Nope, that trail isn't yellow, so we kept walking. Next intersection wasn't yellow either, so we asked some passers-by for help. They told us that there were so many trails in the park that we could pretty much go anywhere and loop back to where we started. So, we turned left (we found out later our original path was right). We kept walking, finding this new trail, ironically the white trail, covered in snow. We passed a lake, then started to climb a hill. When we made it to the top we realized we had crossed the entire park, and were now at the main gate. Time to check the map again. It turned out that the map we had looked at was faded, so the colors were all messed up. No-ones fault, but being color-blind I would like to hope that I was very exempt from taking the blame. I also missed the arrows saying "You are here" because, really, who puts red arrows on a green background?!?!

The top of the park/main entrance was pretty cool. One of the Huntington family was a sculptor, and she made the sculptures that stand either side of the entrance. The first sculpture is of 2 wolves, howling to the sky:

The second is of a bear and its cubs. The bear looks over towards the wolves, with a look on its face that says something like "Yo, wolves, I hear you howling, but if you come over here I'm gonna hit you with my stick. Yep - someone put a stick in my hands."

After looking at the correctly colored map, we found a new route back to the car that would encompass many of the trails we would have originally walked on. The trails wound through trees to lagoons that were still covered over with ice and snow and along streams.

We'll definitely go back again, though next time I might take a tripod with us. We covered probably less than half the trails they have there, even though we walked for around 3 hours, which was awesome. 4 weeks ago, spending 3 hours outside would probably have been miserable.

On Saturday night Erin and John came around and we played some games and ate Mexican food. It was a fun night. Liz killed us all at Monopoly, and some fun deals were made on property.

Sunday I woke up very late for my (recent) standards at 11. Liz was already awake and doing stuff, so we decided to quickly do the grocery shopping and then head to the beach for a walk. Sure, we've been to the beach a lot before, but soon beach season will start and we won't be able to go anymore. To go to Greenwich Beach in season, you have to be a resident who has paid money for a beach card and car pass. If you aren't a resident or don't have a card, you have to buy a pass ahead of time, and I think they're something like $7/person/day, and then it's something like $25/day for your car. So, we've got to make the most of it while we can...

Leaving the beach we started following a guy, who was driving incredibly slowly. He was fidgetting in his seat, and I realized what he was doing. He was getting a comb out of his pocket. For the next 4 miles and 10 minutes, he constantly combed his hair, sometimes 2 handed, and checked his results in the rear view mirror. This even continued onto the interstate, with cars flying past him at 55+ miles/90+ kilometres/hour. What was great about him combing his hair was every time he combed a different way, the bald spot on the back of his head seemed to move and grow. It was very fixating, and we even drove out of our way to follow him and see how long it went on for, we were that enthralled.

Bald spot, highly visible.

Regardless of the traffic around him, he wanted to finish his hair.

Admiring his handywork in the mirror...

before deciding he wasn't quite done yet...

We passed him once on I-95, and when we looked at him he was the seediest looking middle aged guy you're likely to see...

Then we came home and Liz called Josh and they talked about long division.

Yep, it was a good weekend.

Oh, and The Amazing Race was on. Wouldn't you know it - bag someone out (the inept cops) and they come back and win a leg. Jet and Cord finished 4th. One of them bungee jumped with his cowboy hat on. The bungee people wanted him to take it off, but he said it would stay on - and it did. They had also never played soccer before, and chose to do a soccer challenge. They rocked at it. Funniest though was when they had to drink a boot of beer, when neither of them drink. One of them drank most of it - he's a funny drunk.

Dinner time! And How I Met Your Mother is about to start.