I spent the previous evening playing video games with my brother Josh, some of his friends, and some nephews. Josh’s wife, Jessica, stuffed us with delicious food. I needed another hike just to work dinner off, so I put Toren in the pack again and headed out, hoping to find a route from Monte Verde to the Highlands. I let Toren pick the direction whenever there was a fork and he picked right as we did the exact hike I envisioned. The map is below. This crosses two fences. One had a gate you could open; the other we had to climb over.
The view of the valley from up here was really beautiful. I grew up looking at this mountain, Thurston Peak, almost every day of my life:
Since I’m so reticent to buy Toren toys, we arrived in Utah with a variety of toys he has been given, including a number of cars that he was pretending were transformers. When my mom realized he was pretending his cars were transformers, she decided to buy him some. Toren took his two new transformers on the hike and played with them on and off. He also talked my ear off. I’d ask him to tell me what happened in different episodes of Wild Kratts or WordWorld and he’d tell me the whole story (well, his version anyway). It was fun to listen to him.
We went to my brother Danny’s in the afternoon and got a tour of his wife’s family’s dairy farm. We then had a pool party that was rained out near the end, but it wasn’t a problem since we all just moved into Danny’s new mega-castle he is building right next to the pool. The pool could fit in one wing of the barn/shed/castle/man cave/mansion it’s so big. It looks like it will be lots of fun when it’s complete. Lots of fun to be had in Utah!
