Boys day out

Friday was a beautiful afternoon to head out the door with Noah and Bosco, for a boys' afternoon hike at Theo Wirth and Bryn Mawr. It seems like with each expedition we take Noah on he's enjoying it more and more. We were out for almost 2 hours, and he spent 1.5 hours talking and chirping away---the other half hour he took a very uncomfortable-looking nap with his head crammed into the crevice of the hiking pack. He seemed to enjoy it though! Bosco enjoyed his semi-illegal unleashed time as well, exploring every trail head before Noah and I got there. He chose to take a dip in a very green-slime covered bog though, so we had to hike a few extra miles to a beach so he could swim in some clean water.

We've had the fortune of living pretty close to Theodore Wirth since 2005, and it never ceases to amaze me how great of a resource that place is. It's pretty insane to think about--an 800 acre park sitting inside of the Minneapolis boundary. You can take a short hike, and feel like you're in the middle of the boundary waters---yet you're in the center of a 3.5 million person metropolis. Not to mention that Wirth is only one such park in the entire system around us (Minneapolis alone has 160 of them). Pretty cool setup. We've been keeping a watch on the new trail extension they're building by the golf course. Noah, Boss and I walked it and it sure will be a nice addition. It weaves through a beautiful old growth forest, and some of the best terrain in the park system. I'm excited for the pavement to go down so we can take a Burley ride and test it out! This trail could be a useful one for work bike commuting, so I'd like to test it for that reason too. It's nice taking trails to work, but frequent trail stop signs and crossings often make them impractical for commuting. A great addition to a wonderful bike trail network though. No one has good numbers of how many miles of paved trails we have--but its now somewhere in the arena of 300-400 miles, maybe even more. I shouldn't advertise that though, because we certainly enjoy how un-crowded they are.