The JourneY

It started as a simple suggestion by Mike for a Memorial Day activity. I then invited Eric to come along since he couldn't come down the day previous. Some time between that and the beginning of the hike of Y Mountain, it turned into a Bennett Family Excursion, where Mike and I happen to come along. Still trying to figure that one out.

At any rate, after listening to a fairly detailed explanation of the Y taken from Wikipedia by (Matt?), being handed about a dozen rocks from Sadie, a psychological analysis of Spock and why he has no emotion (the conclusion of which somehow came to "His only loyalty is to your entertainment"), lugging Sadie up only one of the switchbacks and nearly dying, listening to Carter ask "Have we gone 98 meters yet?" a dozen or so times until finally responding to him, seeing Molly's response to Mike's answer as to why his head was wet (a raincloud came and dumped on him and left just before Molly came up to him), and roughly one mile of hiking uphill, we came to the bottom of the Y. Mike basically told me that if I didn't hike to the top of the Y, I wasn't a real man. So I acquiesced.

What he "neglected to tell me" is that the section from the bottom to the top of the Y totally sucks. Like, it is as bad as the entirety of the hike up to that point. After much huffing and minor feelings of nausea, we got to the top and staked out a spot at the ledge. The rest of our group arrived shortly thereafter. Eric whipped out two things at that point. One, the camera:Sadie seems rather perturbed that the camera isn't focused solely on her.Pretty much the whole crew that was there.


Two, Strawberry Peanut Butter M&Ms. It sounds a little disturbing, but are actually rather delish. They are a tie-in to Transformers 2. I speculated why there weren't Autobot and Decepticon icons printed on the candies themselves. We decided that if the candy were in the movie itself, it would probably make the movie suck less than it inevitably will. We went down the mountain with few significant events, and Mike and I finished the day off by going to a pizza buffet, effectively negating all the exercise we had done that day. I weighed myself the next day and I had actually lost about two pounds from the days activities. I was rather happy with myself.

Also, today Ben came down for some business stuff and we went out to dinner to catch up. Ben really wanted to go to Tucanos (I did not object), a Brazilian grill where they come to your table with 12-18 different meats (depending on the time of day) over the course of your meal and offer you all you want. It comes with an amazing salad bar that included cinnamon-sugar covered bananas. Yummy. It's all unbelievably good, and if you get the chance to go to one, do not hesitate. My three favorite meats were the Tri-Tip, a teriyaki-beef (it's like the best tasting, most tender jerky ever), and fillet mignon wrapped in bacon. The pork loin was really good, too. Oh, and did I mention the cinnamon-glazed, grilled pineapple? Mmmmm.... After we finished, both of us felt like we were going to burst, so we took a walk around the shopping center before we got in our cars to head home. I weighed myself after I got back, and I definitely gained the pounds back I lost from my hike. But you know what? It was totally worth it.