Sex on the beach...

...Sorta.

For Mother's Day weekend my mom and I decided to hike down to Stinson from Mt Tam and stay at a little B&B by the ocean. We left after school on Friday and made the 2 mile hike in good time. There was a little hiccup when we got to Stinson and couldn't find the B&B but after an hour of wandering the streets (and I use that term loosely) of Stinson we found it. And I'd just like to say that we wouldn't have wandered nearly so long if Stinson had proper street signs! You know, ones that actually mark a continuous street.

Anyhow, our B&B was great and the proprietor was awesome. He had a story for everything and everyone and would often says things along the lines of "Oh, no way, I knew a guy who looks just like you, he was arrested for embezzling 60 million from the bank he worked at and then ran off with his attorney who left her husband and they lived together on a boat in the amazon and had fourteen wild children and there was a monkey..."

On Saturday we grossly overestimated our hiking abilities. After a revolting breakfast of some sort of meat product and eggs we decided to hike to Audubon to see the birds. Now on the map Audubon is not that far from Stinson, at least by car. Even by foot it is only about 8 miles away.
But the first 2.2 miles are straight uphill and the last 2 miles are straight downhill. So on our hike, which we fondly dubbed the Hike from Hell, we vetoed the idea of walking to Audubon and decided instead to hike about a mile and a half on the Coastal Trail and then head back down to the beach via a fire road. So after walking straight up a cliff for about 2 hours we walked in the baking sun for another hour and found ourselves on a fire road that in places was not wide enough to walk side by side.

And that brings me to the title of this post, "Sex on the beach" or rather, sex in the forest. It was mid-afternoon, our knees hurt, we were hungry for something other than trail mix and apples, and our calves screamed from the effort of not slipping on the gravel and flying down the "fire road" on our behinds. My mom started doing something funny. She kept saying "look to your left, look, Kate over there, look on the left!" My mind was split between focusing on the trail and fantasizing about a swim in the ocean and I didn't see anything. When I asked her "what?" she didn't reply so I kept looking to my left, down the hill but I didn't see anything and she still wasn't answering me. I didn't know what was going on and in frustration said quite loudly, "Mom! What am I looking at?" And at that moment I saw them. Stretched out beneath a tree going at it like squirrels, or some other woodland creature. I tried not to laugh but honestly, as my mom said, "they weren't fifty feet off the trail!" Hmmm, not something you usually see or want to see on a hike with your mother...Happy Mother's Day Mom!