Summer Adventures

 This has to be have been one of the most gorgeous weekends of the entire year! We hit NEBCO again on Friday afternoon, and split a really delicious pizza from one of the trucks. Saturday morning we did part of the Branford trail again. Like last time, we dropped my car at the Tabor lot, and then started from the Jarvis Creek Farm portion of the trail, right along the water. The marshland had grown in beautifully since we were last there in spring, and almost all of the osprey platforms had denizens. The weir was very calm this time, so I wasn't freaked out walking over it. Just 1.5 miles brings you out into Stony Creek, which is like a mini-Cape Cod, where we had breakfast at the cafe. The service isn't quick, but that is honestly the best bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich I think I've ever had. It's always nice to see all of the locals greeting each other by name, too.

From there it's another three miles back to Tabor. I had suggested wearing pants, mostly just thinking about ticks, but it turned out to be very important because of the amount of undergrowth and poison ivy capable of touching you even on the trails! 

This time I took a picture of the rock crevice where there are helpfully ropes to help you climb it. I'm still flabbergasted that this is a town trail, right behind the fancy golf course, and yet there is no walk-around if you don't feel like doing a scramble. Sean insisted this time that it's totally doable without the ropes, and yes, probably, but it's steeper than the photo makes it look, especially at the top, and slipping would be a very nasty fall. I don't think I could do this trail in reverse and go down that slope...too afraid of heights. 

Sunday morning we had coffee in town with my friend Denise and her partner Bob, who were passing through on their way back from a vacation in Maine. It's always such a pleasure to see her! It is crazy to think that we met in Rome in 2014, she was married to Francesco, and her kids were teens. Now Gabriel is finishing up his PhD in Physics and hoping to work for a national lab or NASA, while Gregory (once a "Stalinist" Communist, whose facility with languages was so great he shocked Chinese people during a study-abroad in Chengdu) is finishing up a stint with the Peace Corps in West Africa and dating an anthropology/archeology grad student at Tulane. LIFE!

Then Sunday afternoon it was time for the rubes! Charles has gotten into cooking, so yesterday he cooked with his "sous chef" Uncle Sean! They made Armenian-style beef kabobs. Leon tried a stuffed grape leaf and acted like it was the worst thing he'd ever tasted.

I broke out a Lego set, purchased from Costco for just such an occasion. My role was simply to count out pieces and turn pages in the booklet. Unfortunately, not far into the process, something went wrong, and I frankly couldn't figure it out, so Charles came to help out -- which required starting from scratch. Cue Leon lying face-down on the living room carpet in protest. In the end I bagged it up as far as they'd gotten and Jen suggested keeping it to be continued at a future date. 

Finally, this picture: this shows my neighbor Joe watching his tractor be winched out of the creek next to his house on Saturday. We'd just come home from hiking and I was getting my lawn chair set up, vaguely aware of him cutting his front lawn, when all of a sudden the mower cuts out and I hear him yell. I look over, and there is no tractor and no Joe! I ran (limped, thank you gimpy right ankle) over there, and there's Joe sprawled on the embankment, thankfully mostly unharmed, with the tractor having stopped at the retaining wall vs. gone all the way down into the stream. He refused to attend to his bleeding foot at the time, insisting it was nothing, but later texted me that he had to get 16 stitches in his heel. This man had open heart surgery last year...