A short walk in the woods


This morning I hired a car from Enterprise in Ballard. There are two Enterprises in Ballard and I accidentally ordered an Uber to the one I didn’t intend to go to, but luckily that was actually the one I was meant to go to, so a bit of carelessness pays off.
They’d run out of regular sized cars so we got a diminutive Mitsubishi instead, and then drove for 90 minutes to Heather Lake, mostly on the freeway, and for the last mile on a gravel road so full of potholes I thought our little car would vanish in one.

The Heather Lake hike is recommended for inexperienced hikers and kids, but it’s also much longer than the advertised 1.9 miles, and it’s a long, winding, narrow trail full of wet, slippery rock, roots and thick mud. However, apart from a couple of tantrums our girls did the whole thing without complaint. We did have to keep feeding them, but that is fairly normal. Perhaps because we didn’t tell them it wasn’t normal for a four year old to walk 8 km of rocky trail in a pair of sneakers, they didn’t realise it was something to complain about.

On the way down, I ran some sections with La Serpiente, which she seemed really excited by. Of course, you don’t want a small child with no self preservation skills to be sprinting down rocky trails too much.

When we got back to the car, I expected the girls to fall asleep on the way home, but they made it all the way back to Seattle, to a restaurant for dinner, and then home and a short rinse, before finally going to bed. Time for the parents to get drunk and recover from the day.


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