Refreshing Summer Hike

First thing, sorry for the weird blurring going on there in the picture. It turns out I didn't realize that I took a picture of my sons straight up ass LOL but rather than just leaving it there and letting the poor dude suffer with his ass being on the interwebz, I gave it a blur so that trolls when scrolling by it wouldn't know much about what the hell was going on without visiting the post here.

Back to the content at hand though! I worked at a volunteer event back in June I think it was, and it was a great time. Met some interesting people, got to clean up a bunch of trash that shouldn't have been there and I got to explore a bit of a park that I never knew was there despite having been in the area quite a number of times over the years! I told me son about the park and showed him some pictures after I did the event and he was sad that he couldn't go and explore it with me. I made it a personal goal of mine to bring the little dude back there so we could accomplish that, and accomplish it we did!

The place is situated in a fairly decent sized suburban area, with lots of houses and businesses all around it. When you're on the trails in here though you can hardly hear anything but the bugs, birds and critters around you. It's incredibly refreshing and enjoyable! The little man was having a great time walking around, we were talking about the work event that I did and it was a great time, although a little sad because he's getting older and a lot more aware of things. He was asking some really great questions! Damn, that's one that gets you in the feels for sure hahaha.

What was also really nice is that for whatever reason the place really didn't have a lot of mosquitoes! I don't know if they spray the area. They might, because as I mentioned this is in a pretty affluent area so they have quite a bit of disposable money to go around and take care of these types of things. We haven't gotten nearly as much rain in the end of the summer as we started out with, so that could be perhaps a factor here as well. There aren't a lot of nice puddles and stuff for the assholes to start breeding, keeping their numbers down. All good things!

What was good was that we got to explore the area together, one of my favorite things for sure. I actually dislike going to a new spot for any of this type of activity without my son! He's definitely my little buddy and partner in these things so whenever I get a chance to explore something I make sure that I can do it with him so that we enjoy it together.

I remember the days of when I was younger and going places with my dad and how much I enjoyed that, so I hope to be able to reproduce those types of things with my son. You never know what will stick in their minds for these types of things. He's got quite an incredible memory so there are always things that he remembers and I sometimes don't, where it's remarkable what he absorbs. As much as we always try to be our best, we sometimes falter and I know I falter myself. I certainly hope that I replace some of those bad memories with far more of these good ones so that he enjoys more positive memories than bad ones.

What was really nice was going around the whole trail and ending up back at the start here, to see a beautiful and expansive collection of incredible wild flowers everywhere! We got to walk through a significant maze of these and it was really nice. The birds were going nuts, bees, pollinators and all kinds of critters were soaking in the beautiful last few weeks of the summer season here. I think there is a lot of somber thoughts about the winding down to the end of a summer but it's just like life. Things can't always grow and go in a direction such as constant summer without having to be balanced out by the change over to something like autumn and then winter. These cycles are very important and I would like to think that we started off the autumn hiking season with this one here!