Leon Turnbull Photography

My wife’s birthday and my birthday are only one day apart. Perfectly convenient, is how I look at it. My wife hates it. Go figure. Mostly it is because I would rather celebrate the birthdays together, go out for dinner just once, have just one cake, etc. Convenience, you know. Well, I have learned by now that won’t work with her. Two dinners, two cakes, two celebrations.

This year my birthday fell on a Saturday. Yeah! That means I had the day all to myself and could go hiking anywhere I liked. Perfect. I suppose I could have picked a better location but I wanted to try to find something new, and that usually means the chances of actually finding something interesting are quite low, but mainly I just wanted to get out on a nice long hike. Actually I think I could have found something if it weren’t for the mud. A giant mud hole in the road prevented me from being able to drive to the trailhead. I was forced to turn around or else sink into oblivion. It is very strange too because we had so little rain this month. Where did all this mud come from? Some sort of wormhole to another dimension? Well not to be outdone just yet, I studied my maps and found a potential alternate route to my desired creek so I decided to try it. The new route found me hiking along logging roads in the direction of the creek I was trying to get to but in the end I was not able to get down to it due to too much brush and too much steepness. Nonetheless I did have a good long hike so I was not unhappy and it ended with a family dinner at Chicago Fire, the best pizza in California. Mmmmmm I would eat there every week if Tara would let me.

Despite the mud shenanigans on Saturday I would not be shut out for waterfalls this weekend. On Sunday we were planning to go to Phantom Falls on my wife’s birthday. She had never been there and has always said she really wanted to go to it so it was not hard to talk her into it on her birthday. We had the kids as well and so it was a great family outing together amongst the killer cows (we all survived) and the elusive salamander (which my wife unsuccessfully tried to chase over a waterfall). I was not expecting too much in flow on Table Mtn but I did think Phantom Falls would be a little better than it was. We sure do need a lot more rain here. Anyway Tara was really happy to finally get out to see this amazing waterfall and the kids did great on the four mile hike. It was a great morning on Table Mountain.