One day at a time

It was cold today.  Well, cold by Bay Area standards at least.  Meaning it got down to freezing last night, and was in the 40s during the day.  (I know, live here long enough and you become a cold weather wimp.)  We had been thinking about going to a hike in Redwood Park, but decided that today might not be the best day to spend in the shade of a redwood forest.  So instead we took a walk around the neighborhood.

Our destination was John Hinkel Park, up in the hills just a little bit past Indian Rock.  The former is a park none of us had ever been to, the latter is a park we've been to many times.  We stopped at Indian Rock first.  Dylan was significantly more comfortable climbing up the rock this time, compared to his last time there over the summer.  It was a very clear day, and he pointed out the boats on the water in the Bay below and in the distance.  We then continued on to the second park -- I had never even heard of this park until somewhat recently; somehow I ended up on a web page that was talking about it and mentioned an amphitheatre built into a hill there.  That was indeed there, but the find that we were really excited about was the old playground.  Swings on a huge structure with very long chains that swing up way high compared to the small ones at most playgrounds.  And best of all: an actual, old-fashioned see-saw.  I've been searching for one of these for a while, and was pretty disappointed when I realized that just about all of the playgrounds now only have these really lame springy things and not real see-saws.  Not something I had ever really noticed until I became a parent, how safe and boring most playgrounds are today.  There was one other kid in the playground, a little bit older than Dylan (around 4), and the two of them really enjoyed riding the see-saw, even if their weight was a little mismatched and I needed to give Dylan a bit of an assistance on every round.

Any way, the whole reason I'm writing this is that the total walk we did was about 3 miles.  Plus a fair amount of elevation gain.  Not something I probably would have thought that much about before, but it was quite a bit given my recent relative level of inactivity.  Perhaps the most strenuous bit of anything I've done since our visit back east a few months back.  I was pretty tired and worn out afterwards, but I did okay.

So even though I still feel like I have a cold a bit, and it's still somewhat annoying, I'm doing okay.  And trying to slowly push my activity level.  It was a nice walk.  And Dylan had a lot of fun.  (He rode in the Chariot for the majority of the walk -- I can't imagine how long it all would have taken at the pace of toddler.)