Raft Peak Adventure

It's been an interesting few days. We're surviving without kids, shockingly. I've always relied on my children for support, and affection. Their ignorance to all those huge stressors really helped me through. Their little hugs when I said I needed one really helped.
Thankfully, Mr is with me.
We had a busy weekend, visiting with friends, trying to keep ourselves occupied from the emptiness that is our house.
Yesterday we undertook a pretty intense hike to the top of Raft Peak. Well, we didn't really make it to the very top, sadly, an impending storm cut our hike short...that and my impending heart attack from too much oxygen. I think if we had actually made it straight to the top, we would've had a difficult time making it back down without me collapsing. I'm a lot more out of shape than I thought. Really, it wasn't all the panting as Mr was taking me straight up the face on loose shale. It was more the bugs. the bugs were terrible, and no amount of swatting kept them away. I swear that at one point one crawled into my ear and decided to camp out there, but no adverse side effects have shown themselves yet. It could have been the mouse sized spiders I saw scuttling between the rocks to avoid the stomp of my little sneakered foot. It could have been the pungent odor of bear.
When we finally did make it back down, the clouds opened up and let loose a humungo torrent of rain. We honestly couldn't tell just how close it was because the valley is so filled with smoke from the surrounding forest fires that we couldn't tell the difference between rain clouds and smoke.
It was an enjoyable experience though, and the sleep I got afterwards was next to heaven. A straight 10 hours of sleep, and I don't feel too bad today. I thought for sure that my knees were going to be screaming at me, but I'm not stiff, nor am I sore. Good business. Maybe it was that extra large plate of linguini with alfredo sauce that did the trick. Who knows.