URBAN HIKERS

Get outside!✔️

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Saturday morning I woke up with this idea that maybe we'd head out to a park for an urban hike. I voiced this idea to Michael when he finally crawled out of bed around noon. He took on that tone of voice he likes to use when he doesn't really want to do anything that's not his idea, so I bribed him with lunch. We ended up at Char Bar where we had unusually odd service and for the first time ever, sent something back because we didn't like it. I had ordered a side of cheesy grits. The grits were crunchy. The waiter told me that's how they make them. Every one of my southern dead relatives spun around in their graves and I could hear Chad yell all the way from Chattanooga "the Fuck?!?" Also, he would never put cheese in his grits.

Anyway, after lunch we headed back to the car and Michael decided that he desperately wanted a hot tea. We were passing a coffee shop as he decided this, but when we got inside he couldn't find hot tea on the menu. We left and then went to another place. This place was closed. Then we headed south on Maine with the intention of just going to Starbucks even though it was out of the way, but saw another coffee shop. So we we stopped at this coffee shop that smelled more like pretentious hipster than coffee. They did not have hot tea, but I ordered an Americano and while I waited (twenty minutes) for my cup of coffee, Micheal continued down to Starbucks. He came back to get me without a tea because he didn't want to wait in line of seventeen cars deep. 

Fine.

We headed towards the park, but Michael was still looking around for a place to get a hot tea. We were now in a run down urban area that for certain is not going to have a coffee or tea shop and he's grumbling. Then he spots a Seven Eleven. He parks the car outside the store and tells me to lock the car behind him. We are in that kind of neighborhood. He walks into the Seven Eleven just as the cashier is busting a guy for shoplifting. Again, we're in that kind of neighborhood. He fills a large cup with hot water and dunks in a bag of Lipton tea and is pleased as punch. His giant cup of tea cost $1 while my tiny cup of pretentious coffee was $4. He wanted to be sure to point that out. Finally he had his tea and we were on our way to the park. Then we got a little lost, made u-turn and two left turns and finally made it to Kessler Park. 

The annoyances of that last three hours floated away. We slid down the giant slide. We walked around the Colonnade that was built in 1908 and admired the Eternal Flame JFK Memorial established in 1965. We hiked down a trail coated in fallen leaves that took us into a wooded area and looped back around to the Colonnade. And all was well. We walked quietly and relaxed back to our car to make our way home. And discovered that I had stepped in the stinkiest animal poop. It was plastered all up inside the waffle bottoms of my shoe. We drove home with the windows rolled down. 

It was a lovely day.