Happy Trails

As you may have noticed, my hubs has been doing a lot of traveling recently. Big trips. Long trips. In fact he has been away three out of four weeks this month. Missed two full weekends at home. Yes, technically he can make up those 'lost weekends' sometime during the year but let's be honest...he probably won't. Oh maybe a day or two but he has vacation to use plus, when you're away from your office for two weeks you kinda need to get back to the office. Which is where he is this week. yay!

Although hubs has traveled for work all of our married life this month has been way more than the norm. While its exhausting on many levels he enjoys interacting with people in countries around the world and handles all the coming and going better than most. It sounds exotic to some people and often times I guess it is. Here's a dinner he had last week in Mexico City-

Those are grasshoppers on that taco.

Mmmm?

All this to say that in spite of his around the world travels, at heart he's still a Tennessee boy who likes nothing better than a walk in the woods with his best girl and his dog. We don't live far from a stretch of the Appalachian Trail and we've been wanting to hike the bit that's nearby.

When we lived in NJ 20 years ago we used to take our little girls to the trail. Are they just too adorable or what?! Course we never got too far because somebody always conked out en route to the top, but we tried.

Sigh.

Back to present day...it was cool yesterday but also bright and sunny so we took advantage of that and hit the trail. As we were pulling out of our driveway we saw these vultures on our neighbors rock.

I know they're part of that whole circle of life thing but I gotta say I'm not a fan. I was hoping their presence wasn't some kind of omen. Who thinks I've watched The Jungle Book a few too many times?

To access the wooded portion of the trail you first have to cross a large open field. As we started across we heard gunfire and decided we should see where it was coming from. Wouldn't want to accidentally be mistaken for a deer now, would we?

Turns out it was a local gun club holding a 'frozen toes' event in the next field over. They were shooting at targets so we relaxed. We chatted with them for a few minutes and I think hubs would have been happy to hang out there all day but we had a mountain to climb. Literally.

One thing you should know about Northern NJ-its rocky.

Very rocky.

The trail thru here is also rocky.

And steep.

And my knees are not what they were at 30, that's for sure, but I persevered...

We made a couple of stops on the way to the top...

Someone needed a break.

And we needed to take a cheesy picture.

Everybody needed to check out the beautiful views...

Totally worth the jello legs.

And spending a day outdoors with this guy?

aka the mountain goat....

...still makes me happy.