On the spur of the moment, I hired a car yesterday, so today we drove the kids up to Poo Poo Point. The weather was lovely, although a little cold, and it was easy to get the children moving. We stopped for a coffee at Monkey Grind or some similar silly name, then hit the road.
On a good day without traffic, it only takes 30 minutes to reach the trail head – there’s a few different places to start, but we chose the not-very-steep-or-rocky approach for a change, rather than the previous incredibly rocky, steep route. With my friend Dave in tow, we started the ascent, and it was at least ten minutes before the girls demanded snacks.
When I made them walk up the hard side, they got food every ten minutes. This time, my wife was much sterner; they got a snack, then something after half an hour, and then after an hour and a half, when La Serpiente was weeping that she was tired and cold and didn’t want to hike any more. (We abandoned hope of reaching the summit shortly after, but going up and down was 15,000 steps for adult-sized legs, so for the children it was much tougher…)
Once again, Destroyer forged off ahead. Now both kids have decent hiking shoes rather than worn out sneakers, they’re probably a bit better going out hiking, although it was a bog fest on most of the mountain, and then ice once we got higher up. Just a bit higher, and we might have had some lovely views…
We got back down, about thirty minutes faster than we ascended (thank you, gravity), took the kids for a snack, then drove back to Seattle to pick up cider at the Ballard Farmers’ Market. As we seem to be buying cider every week, you might think we’re obssessed, but no: today, we were collecting cider from a cider subscription service we signed up for. Oh. That also sounds obsessed.
With cider in hand, we went home. The kids then went full on bogglingly mental, playing a game where they pulled as hard as they could on either side of a glass door, until I got mad and shouted at them. Then it was playtime in the park, interrupted by pizza, while I played football with my manager and his son, who had come down to kick a ball around.
This evening, I went to the sauna for 15 minutes in the hope it would help my weary legs. It didn’t. And home, to put the kids to sleep and to play Blood Bowl…