Birthday adventures :)

Took my birthday off work today.  The original plan was either the ropes course in Niagara or a local beach - both of which got toasted by weather that was going to be on and off rain all day interrupted by thunderstorms.  Awesome.

So backup plan - went out for breakfast as a solid start :).  And then went hiking at Short Hills.  I found a just slightly less than 5k loop "Terrace Creek Trail".  Sb good to go right?   Well for the first half it was; the trail was well marked, we were clearly on the right one, and despite a few raindrops making it through, for the most part the weather was holding.   And then...  There were multiple trail options and none of them were ours :(. We spent a fair bit of time (and a couple kms) walking around to see if we could find the 2nd half of our loop and eventually failed at took a completely random other half loop back.  Our walk ended up being an extra couple kms long and with a soundtrack of increasingly angry thunder.   However, we didn’t have to double back so I actually really enjoyed both parts other than the frustration of not knowing where we went wrong 🤣    Any the trees protected us from most of the rain, so I’m still deeming it a pretty strong start to the day :)

This was my favourite spot on the trail

We made it back before the serious rain though and home with no challenges, only a few minutes before the torrential rain hit.  Chilled for the afternoon with my critters and looked up some promising restaurants for dinner, completely forgot that basically everything that step nicer is closed on Mondays around here.  Fail.  Ah well - we went to Chilie and Agauve for nachos and fondido which was super tasty.  Stopped on the way back to snag some birthday cake and overall a really lovely day.