Shortcuts

Sometimes the shortcut is not worth it. That's what I learned last night.

I decided to go for a walk last night instead of a run, since my knee has been hurting. There is a trail behind my house that I wanted to explore. I had to walk 3/4 of a mile to get to it and was hoping that as I walked along the trail I would discover a way that it connected to somewhere closer to my house.

After walking longer than planned and ignoring the feeling that I should just turn around and go back, I finally turned around. I didn't want to walk all the way back around since I could see my house from the trail and the river was pretty low in some spots and the riverbed looked pretty dry.

I took myself and my brand new, out of the box that very day, shoes and scrambled down into the riverbed. I slipped on a wet spot and got my shoes a bit dirty, but I kept going. That should have been my clue to turn around and just walk the long way.

As I stepped onto a spot that looked solid enough, I sunk to my shins. There goes my beautiful new shoes. I turned to go back and my other foot sunk. Now I'm really pulling to get my feet out and off come my shoes. I yank them out of the muck and walk down a bit to see if there is a better spot to cross. I thought about just going back up on the trail and walking home, but that's a long way to walk when you're covered in mud and don't have any shoes. So I pushed onward. Onward through 2 feet of nasty, smelly, silty, grey muck that felt like it was pulling me down. I had my shoes in one hand and just kept praying that I would make it through this mid thigh high gunk to the other side.

I made it and walked home in my nasty socks. I started washing my shoes out under the faucet outside the house and washed my legs off. Then went around back and stripped off my pants so I could walk through the house without tracking mud everywhere. I grabbed a scrub brush, soap and a pair of shorts and went back outside to try and salvage my shoes. The soap and scrub brush seemed to do the job. I threw my socks, shoes, pants, and jacket into the wash and then headed to the shower. I smelled SO bad. Apparently river muck is very smelly.

Overall things turned out okay. I didn't get anything else done that I wanted to, but I discovered that in life, sometimes shortcuts just aren't worth it.