The Best Kind of Adventure in Everyday Ramblings

Yesterday in our further quest to get to know certain neighborhoods in our fair city we went for a “hill walk” on my side of town out of a book. It was the cemetery loop.

We started out at a park that neither of us knew was there, down the hill from the hair salon we both go to. The whole walk was this journey of discovery. After we went down the broad trail into this deep wooded area lined with fragrant Douglas firs we came across a group of affluent looking teenagers climbing around on the rocks in the creek below.

They stopped us and said they were on a “Doing Good” scavenger hunt and one of the things they had to do was to serenade strangers. One of the young men walked perilously across the rocks with a guitar and we got a heartfelt but tentative and slow chorus of a Mexican folk song while we held still and held a little banner and a short video was taken.

Although they didn’t say it, this was clearly a Christian Youth Group thing. It was all very silly and good-natured.

(I find it interesting that the person who has been elected our President and is not actually doing his job as President because he is busy running to be elected our President again in 3 years took a break from his golf weekend at a resort he owns to come back to town to give a speech to a group of Christian Evangelicals about religious freedom while his Muslim Ban goes into effect disallowing orphaned Syrian children to come to the U.S. to live with their grandparents.

What he is talking about is not religious freedom, it is the opposite; that the dominant religion, in this case Christianity, is taken for granted and absorbed into every aspect of modern life in an unquestioning, privileged and tribal way. )

We crossed the new footbridge over a lively creek past a secluded little waterfall and then up and out into a mixed residential area with all sorts of places with gorgeous gardens and extra plots of land.

The picture above is of the small peaceful Jewish cemetery.

Then we went off to find the Riverview Cemetery. It is huge, 35 acres; a nonprofit and neither of us really knew it was there. It is has wide winding paths and they allow bike riders. There was a sign that said no dogs and we debated if we should go in with Frida but were thinking it would be a straight shot across and we’d keep her between us on the path.

Except the instructions were not very good and the map in the book sort of stopped in the middle of the cemetery and we confidently headed off into a state of being rather profoundly lost.

We kept trying to stop male bike riders in all their bike gear to get some help and both of us were secretly having fantasies of calling for a car somehow because we could see a busy road that was not the one we were looking for. Finally we were able to stop a lovely female runner, a clearly successful middle-aged woman that told us she had been running the cemetery for over 20 years.

She told us how to get back to one of the offices and then was worried because we would have a walk on a road with no shoulder or bike path that curved around all over the place. Luckily it did have two lanes and as it was a foggy holiday weekend Saturday morning not too much traffic.

They gave us a map at the office and we made the treacherous road walk in a thin rut full of “tree cotton” that flared up my allergies. I looked a bit like a zombie with red red eyes but we were troopers and it turns out the rest of the walk was relatively easy and totally engaging.

We did stop at the salon and say hello to our shared hair person towards the end.

It really was the best kind of an adventure and we enjoyed it a great deal. :)

Last updated July 03, 2017