I was talking to one of my best friends about a job decision she’s trying to make. She has to decide between staying with her current company in one progressive, glamorous city until she vests, or moving to another, equally chic city (where she doesn’t know anyone) to take on an exec role. Two very excellent choices, which makes it really hard for her.
“I don’t know,” she said “I feel like I need a new adventure.”
“I know what you mean,” I said. But I didn’t.
I’m just not that adventurous. Yesterday I got really excited that Starbucks is making cold brew now. Aside from every single daily learning moment with my 6-month old daughters, that is the most exciting thing that’s happened to me in ages.
The other way of looking at it is that everything about my life right now is one huge adventure in normcore existence. I grew up in a progressive rural area, a child of hippies, went to college in a dirty east coast industrial city, and have spent my adult life in urban and urban-adjacent places. Suddenly, I live in a Truman Show-esque suburb with manicured lawns, actual white picket fences, and easy access to every single chain store in existence.
It’s a pretty benign adventure, yes, but an adventure all the same.
One of the small ways in which I try to create the illusion of adventure is my idiotic determinism to go on new and different stroller walks in nature with the girls. My betrothed works nights, so he is rarely awake during our prime morning hours (a phrase I seriously never thought I would hear myself utter), and we are usually on our own. There is a really sweet park that I can walk to from our house, and I often do. But sometimes I get tired of walking in circles, and I crave some actual nature for me and the girls. We live at the base of a beautiful mountain range. It’s so close I can practically touch it.
So it is that, twice in the last week, I have driven 45 minutes each way to try to find a good stroller walk in Mill Creek Canyon, the third canyon away from us. I had heard Mill Creek had some nice hikes, and I really believe that it probably does, although I still haven’t personally experienced one. When I drove up there on Saturday, no one—not the Internet, not the park ranger at the toll booth, not the official map, not all of Facebook—had any suggestions for me on where I could walk a double stroller. So I found my way to the first promising-looking paved road up the mountain and gave it a try.
After I figured out how to get past the padlocked gate, which was arranged at the precise angle to make it impossible to get the stroller either over or under, we headed uphill, only to discover that we had just happened to visit Porter Trail on the one day of the year that the handful of residents there have a “cleanup party.” This is an annual event which entails a lot of service vehicles passing back and forth on the narrow one-lane road, and lots of tiny particulates of airborne debris as leaf blowers and such-not do their thing.
That was kind of a bust, but on my way out, a kindly resident told me about a boardwalk just up the hill. So this morning, I once again loaded the girls and the heavy double stroller into the car to make our way up Mill Creek Canyon. But the “boardwalk hike” turned out to be just a 50-yard-long stretch of wooden boardwalk connecting two adjacent parking lots along the main road. We strolled back and forth on it a few times and then went home, dejected.
Tomorrow is another day, and perhaps I’ll wake up with fresh determination to conquer the double stroller paradox. I’ve had just about enough adventure for today, though.
