"Wolverine!!!"

Floating Head shouted from the top of the mountain, as she bravely fought off the Communist Cubans who invaded our small Colorado town...alright, so we were daydreaming that we were in the movie "Red Dawn" but that’s because we were delirious from THE HIKE. Saturday morning, I met Vu and Elba at Port Authority at 8:30, where we took the bus up to Rockland State Park in Nyack, New York (a very pretty, quaint little town by the way, very cutesy...) to meet up with the Sierra Club for a day-long hike. We started out at about 10:30, hiked up and down the hills and valleys surrounding the lake on one side, the Hudson River on the other. After 3 hours (4 miles), we ate lunch by the banks of the Hudson River and some old abandoned, spooky-looking Blair Witch project type houses, then we hiked (thankfully) along a more flat bike path that was closer to the river to loop back to the park where we started. THE HIKE was not a beginner hike...unfortunately, we chose a more advanced hike as our first and while we got through it - DAMN DID IT HURT!!! Our knees and butts and thighs = SORE! There were a couple of seriously steep uphill climbs where I thought "nope, they are going to have to contact the Donald and get the Trump Copter to get me out of here...but I kept going until I got to a flatter surface at the top and then I would rest for a second (or two..or 45) to catch my breath and regain feeling in my wobbly legs...and then after lunch on the bike path I was fine but into the last half hour of the hike, I had no energy left..I was just dragging myself along the rest of the way...but one thing that helped was that I stayed at the back with the Sweep - he is the person who stays at the end of the group to make sure everyone is doing ok and waits behind if someone needs to stop to "use the loo" or rest or whatever..and thank god for the Sweep, because Dean, the leader was GONE - he was always about 100 feet ahead of the rest of us, for the most part, he hiked too fast we thought - because it was really pretty up there and so occasionally we liked to stop for pics or just to take in the landscape and enjoy it, but not Dean, Dean was out and gone in the blink of an eye. He’s probably done this hike a million times though so maybe that’s why he doesn’t care to stop and smell the roses like we did. But anyway, I stayed behind and walked and talked to the Sweep, who was a man in his 60's probably and told me how he got into hiking and some of his misadventures camping and hiking and such but one of the things he told me was that when he first started hiking, he used to not talk, thinking that he was conserving his energy or it wasn’t worth the effort as you are straining and working hard but then he realized talking or listening to someone talk made it easier to get through the difficult parts because you weren’t so focused on your pain or the exertion - it was like an out of body experience where you just listen to the other person and not pay attention to how much your body is screaming and then before you know it, you are past the difficult part. So he’s telling me this as we near the end of the hike and I’m tired at this point - it’s been 8 miles and 4.5 hours of pretty much nonstop hiking and I see that the flat part of the trail has ended... and what looms ahead is ... a giant hill that curves back up and over the hill we started out on!! And the only way to get out of here to a place where I can sit and rest (and use the loo) is to get over that damn hill...ARRGGGGHHH!! So needless to say, we made it and I thank the Sweep for his help.
Now, the other interesting part of the day was Orange Hat. Orange Hat was a strange fellow with a pedophile air about him. You know the type. 70's porn star mustache, kind of smelly looking like he might not bathe or do laundry on a regular basis, probably lives with his mother and plays with Star Wars figurines even though he’s in his late 40's. From the moment we arrived, he gravitated towards us, like "ah, the ladies have arrived" and he kept on giving Floating Head these weird smiles and looks and would try to join our conversation, meanwhile looking like an animal evaluating its prey. So at the end of the hike, the three of us were leaving the restrooms and the rest of the group had already dispersed and were getting into their cars to leave and who do we see lingering behind? Orange Hat. "Uh, do you girls need a ride, I have a car...uh, I can drive you to the George Washington Bridge..uh, the buses from there run every 30 minutes, uh.." and we cut him off "NO! We are fine, the bus picks us up every 29 minutes from here, NO THANKS! And we know had we gone with him, the A/C would have contained some sort of knockout gas and we would have either been sold as sex slaves in Thailand or ended up in the dungeon he created under the floorboards in his apartment...he probably goes on the Sierra Club hikes to scout for locations to dump bodies or something...or he could have been a slightly odd man, socially inept and he was just trying to be friendly and we are being judgmental, but either way dude, I don’t know you and I’m not getting into a car with you! So then it was an hour and a half bus ride home and then I came back to my apartment, sore as hell and I’m sure smelly, made some dinner and fell asleep for an hour, woke up, had a super hot shower and that was the end of my night.
Today there is supposed to be an open house for interested buyers in the apartment and that is all I have planned today. Stay tuned!