The Commoner Visits Nature

 Now I don't take many vacations-I usually am visiting relatives or going to hockey tournaments, but Rob was really against a trip to Dublin considering the tickets had been running about 900 dollars each and he suggested this place.  Okay I thought, better than nothing and I really like San Luis Obispo there's outdoor shopping and great restaurants.

This was quite a vacation we took.  We were at a beautiful spa resort near San Luis Obispo called Sycamore Springs.  This place is famous for it's mineral hot springs which are supposed to have miraculous healing qualities.  Well it must have had miraculous effects on me because I went hiking through the mountains.

It was really nice this resort.  I ate a lot this month as you may have noticed and welcomed a chance to go hiking mostly for the calories I would burn.  I don't hike-ever-I'll hike through cities or  through shopping malls but that's it.  I don't understand the concept-but other than mineral springs that's what you do at this place so okay I agreed. 

There were two hikes to choose from a hike that meandered to the beach and a harder more expert hike up a trail through the mountains.  You know how competitive I am-I took the hard one.  They said you could see the beach from the top.  I don't know what I thought that really meant but I had to do the harder hike and Rob went along with my dastardly plan.


This hike was 2 miles up hill.  I was okay with that -I'm in pretty good shape and it went fine.  You could see the picture above-the winding and the trees, and the cliff, and no people.  That freaked me out a little and it went on and on and up and up-so I started instagramming pictures and apparently uploading them all to facebook.  

At one point after what seemed like forever I started to feel  a little claustrophobic surrounded by these jagged edged rocks and I looked down and noticed this at my feet.  This I told my self was a fault line-maybe it wasn't but at this point it didn't matter.  I looked up and noticed trees all around and it struck me-I was in big trouble if there was an earthquake-I was in bigger trouble if there were a forest fire, and then I started to really freak out.

Rob suggested we turn around but I knew we had to be close to the top and nature wasn't going to get the best of me.  It wasn't too far after that that I could see water and I immediately felt better.  We could have chosen a few different paths, but at this point I really wanted to get down and out of this mess.  Besides I've seen a lot of movies and read Hansel and Gretel and was sure if we chose any of those other paths we would never find our way home, and I didn't want to have to resort to possible cannibalism to survive.


Going down was much easier and there were quite a few people going up at this point and I conquered my fears and hiked up a mountain.  A few thoughts crossed my mind-I could get the same view on a plane flying into Los Angeles, and the same exersice trapesing through any city in America and would have been much safer.


When I lived in New York, long before I even knew where San Jose was, I would often watch the news and see fires, floods, mudslides, and earthquakes happening in California and I would say "that California is very pretty but mother nature hates her, who would live there? You're much safer dealing with people in a city than nature."

Little did I know-the commoner says keep your feet planted in habitats similar to their natural states.