A good day today!

I woke up this morning and exercised with the Wii My Fitness Coach before breakfast only to discover it was my 200th workout with the program. Alas, there were no balloons or confetti. Maya (the computerized fitness coach) said nothing about the milestone. But I thought it was pretty neat and snapped a photo.

After breakfast I decided to go out for a walk. A couple of days ago my son and I headed out for a walk in the park across the street. It's a small park and a bit oddly designed. First you walk around a man-made pond on a gravel trail... which dead ends on a lawn. Walk east across the lawn and you hit a concrete trail and a bridge across the creek. Cross the bridge and walk south and you hit another small bridge then the trail goes in a loop through some woods. The loop can be walked in several minutes; this is not a big trail. If you go north the trail dead ends at a park and a parking lot. Go east across the lawn behind the park and you hit a chain link fence. Go north past that and there's a dirt trail (mostly used by local teens) that goes up and down a couple of hills and ends on top of a dirt cliff overlooking the creek.

It's possible to get a small but decent walk with both the trail and the walk to the cliff. My son and I got to the first bridge and discovered the town is doing repairs on the trail... right in front of the bridge. There was no way across and, as it was pushing 35C with the humidex, we ended up turning around and going home.

Today I decided I was going to take a walk on a trail the next town over, which meant taking the bus. I was standing, waiting for the bus (right beside the park) when I noticed a chill in the breeze. Looked up and clouds were building up in the west. This happened yesterday as well and we had a huge downpour. I hadn't wanted to end up at the back end of the hiking trail with no real shelter in the pouring rain so I decided to go to the local trail again. There is another way to access the park from the south end and walking through an empty lot by the creek. The bus I'd been waiting for came just as I was leaving the road, maybe three meters from the stop.

The trail started out lovely with flowers blooming along both sides. I looped around the path twice then headed toward the cliff trail. The first part of the trail was a bit weedy then I climbed the first hill and discovered it was really overgrown. I got past that and stared in dismay.


The trail is in the bottom middle of the picture. No, really there is a trail in there. And yes, I made it through.

Luckily it was only completely overgrown for a few meters. Of course I spent those meters waiting to be mobbed by every passing spider, waving a stick in front of me hoping to break any and all webs that might be covering what was the path.

The view from the top of the trail was pretty, as usual, but not worth wading through meters of weeds (and who knows how many spiders). This is a trail better saved for spring when the weeds are just sprouting and autumn when they're shriveling up. The other trails all have similar and lovely views... and don't require a machete to traverse them!

Then I came to the final reason I wasn't coming back to this trail any time soon...

That truck is on the east side of the bridge, the side I was walking on and the side they hadn't been working on. As you can see from the state of the path this is much needed work and I'm sure we'll appreciate it come autumn. But when I take my next walk (hopefully tomorrow) it'll be on the trail one town west of us. Ironically the clouds all blew north and we never got rain today.

At least now I know of three trails easily reached by local transit. Two summers ago, if the nearby trail had been closed I would have known of no other place to walk.

And tonight my son and I went to Boxfit. We're planning on hitting the Y again tomorrow night to work out in the exercise room and have a swim.