The Great Christmas Day Afternoon Hike

After a wonderful and crazy morning of stockings!  Presents!  Food!  Playing outside!  The little people,(some of which were feeling under the weather with viruses anyway) all went down for a wonderful afternoon nap.  After the big kidlets had read on their own for a bit, Auntie Dot and I rounded them up for a bit of hiking.  They had a lot of energy that needed to be released, and we didn’t want any little people waking up.  It was a beautiful day outside.

First we headed down to Lester Park.  It would have been a great hike, but when we had gone around about two bends, the trail became glazed with glare ice.  It was like a level luge track.  I’ve never seen continuous glare ice like this on a trail ever.  Seriously, you probably could have ice skated on it, except that it was pretty bumpy and had some slimy clay mixed in, which only served to make things more slippery.

The kidlets were thrilled.  They were scooting and sliding and luckily managed not to fall off of any cliffs.

Middle aged me found it a bit more trepidatious.  Especially since I was not wearing ice grippers on my boots, and I was carrying my camera.

Auntie Dot went around two more bends and then called back that it looked like the trail was going to be like this for quite some time.  I was inching along far behind everyone else.  Inching is maybe a bit too optimistic.  I was barely moving because I was slipping so much!  I called back that I didn’t think I could handle this long term.

Much to the dismay of the kidlets we decided to find another trail to hike on.

Everyone turned around.  I was still barely inching.  Dot suggested I just scoot on my bottom, but I wasn’t wearing snow pants because it was too warm, and I didn’t want to get clay all over my “knit work pants.”  It’s kind of a family joke that I have knit work pants and knit exercise pants and knit pajama pants.  To me they are all vastly different.  Apparently everyone else thinks they all sort of look like pajamas.  They call me on my “knit work pants” that I end up sleeping in half the time because I’m too lazy to find my “knit pajama pants.”  Dot had to sort of rescue me off the ice a couple of times, but eventually I made it back to the car.  It was pretty funny . . . quite the adventure.

We headed up the hill to the forest closer to our house, where it had snowed last week instead of rained and sleeted.  While the snow was covered in a crunchy, icy coating, these trails were a lot more hikeable than the other one.  

We tried hard to walk the energy out of this crew.  We nearly succeeded.  There was a lot of goofiness on this trip through the woods.

Usually we go sledding as a family on Christmas day, but this year the snow conditions were definitely not optimal for that winter activity, plus all throughout the time the cousins were visiting various people were battling a number of nasty viruses.  At one point some people did go sledding, but there always seemed to be some people down and out. That’s just how it goes some years.