Rubbish Trail.

Subtitle: Never Underestimate Your Own Back Yard.

We live in a very suburban residential area. You have to drive through five minutes of nothing but neighborhood to arrive at our house from the main road, and there’s not much space within all that that isn’t occupied by houses, front yards, or back yards.

However, we’d heard that at the end of our street, there was a secret trail into some rare woods. In the two and a half years that we’ve lived here, we’d never attempted to find or explore this trail, but we decided it was high time to put on our Dora Shoes and go exploring.

We set off on one of our evening-Daddy’s-home-and-we-all-need-a-change-of-pace walks.

We knew about where the trail was, but it wasn’t very easy to spot: It wasn’t much of a trail.

We quickly dubbed the lack-of-trail as “Rubbish Trail”, because of the menacing sign right above it:

It’s hard not to read with a British Accent when you encounter a sentence with the word “Rubbish” in it.

As soon as we stepped foot onto the trail, we heard water running. We knew adventure was afoot. We crossed Christmas Tree Curve:

(Do those count as rubbish??)

We beat back bushes, jumped over a humongous downed tree, and within no time, found this glorious sight:
(Notice the dots of reflection in the picture – that would be pollen. It was, after all, still pollen week.)

Ali and I immediately made our way out into the middle of the stream and sat down:

While Chris went to explore upstream:

What we didn’t see is what happened to him while he was upstream. He came back with a good side:

And a very, very bad side:…which made me feel pretty good, since I’m usually the clumsy one of the family.

Ali, however, was not impressed. Being the worry-wart that she is, she started moaning anytime he would walk on the rocks and and would repeat under her breath, “Be careful, Daddy…don’t fall!”

Which was quite fitting, since she gets all of her paranoia from her Daddy.

On the way back, we photographed the big log we had to climb over:

…which would make an awesome Daddy/Daughter photo, if it didn’t look like Chris had a horrible case of the pit sweats, thanks to his fall.

We managed to make it past Christmas Tree Curve and out into the neighborhood again, where Ali was only slightly ashamed to be seen by all of the neighbors with her Daddy and his massive messiness:

…but really, his look kinda went with the whole theme of “Rubbish Trail”.