“You’re not going to let your ex convince you that you are old and boring and not worth being with are you?” Jadda asked.

“No!” I replied.

“Exactly.”

I had been catching up on the phone with Jadda, a friend and fellow traveller who I had actually briefly casually dated right around when I started this blog; but she ran away with this Swedish, adventure documentary filmmaker/ski legend named Bjarne who was constantly taking her to places like Banff, Sweden, Norway, etc.  I guess I couldn’t ever really blame her for the fact that she chose to run off with him, because the guy was about a billion times cooler than me, you know, small town, country bumpkin attorney and educator Rob Taylor.  I mean, he was the type of big deal to where freaking Powder Magazine wrote an article about the two of them when they started dating.  Sadly, to this very day no one has ever wrote magazine articles about my dating life…or about any aspect of my life, for that matter.  Sigh.

But that’s always been Jadda, who has always had this larger than life resume.  A rancher’s daughter, skilled pilot and Napa trained chef who has already traveled most of the world, helped volunteer and work to end hunger in places like Nepal, holds a Bachelor’s degree in Sustainable Agriculture from UC Davis and a Master’s in environmental science, has dabbled in documentary filmmaking herself, and is currently living in Hawaii where she helped form a nonprofit dedicated to creating and providing gardening and sustainable food programs to K-5 schools throughout the Hawaiian islands.

And her island home looks like this:

And this:

And this:

And this:

She and I had both gone through breakups recently, and she has been considering moving back to the mainland to start work on a PhD in sustainable food systems and I have been dealing with my never-ending existential angst, so we have been leaning on each other more lately as friends to motivate one another to push on and forward with life, broken hearts be damned.  And the nighttime phone conversations have actually been great, and she wants me to go visit her in Hawaii, even though we both know that probably won’t be happening anytime soon due to the coronavirus and Hawaii having a mandatory, 14-day quarantine for anyone traveling to the islands.

But anyways, back to the story!  It was forecast to be 110 degrees throughout the weekend and workweek here in Red Bluff, and I was whining to Jadda about how I was sick of the heat, and how I’ve become old and boring, and how I would probably just spend the weekend hiding in my house away from the heat.  So Jadda gave me some motivating words, and convinced me to ditch the old man habits and get out in the world.  And so, I got in my Jeep and drove over the mountains to Eureka, to spend a weekend in much cooler temperatures of 75 degrees.  And when I got there, I beelined my way to Clam Beach, this amazing long, long stretch of beach that I used to run during cross country meets in high school, the Clam Beach Invitational to be exact!

And the beach looked like this:

And this:

And this:

And this:

And this:

I spent a long time walking up and down the beach and enjoying its waves.  And as I walked along the shore, I resolved that I still had more adventure in me.  So at 3:00, I drove up the coast a bit further to Redwood National Park and went on a brief (not brief) 5 mile hike.

Because it was late in the day, I chose one of the first hikes that I saw, on the “Skunk Cabbage Trail.”  It looked friendly enough and supposedly ultimately leads to the ocean, but unbeknownst to me at the time, it’s apparently also one of the longer hikes in the park and only really has young growth redwoods.  So…to make a long story short, I went on a fairly strenuous 5 mile hike through an absolute jungle filled with wild beasts and creepy crawlies that made me nervous every 10 seconds, and by the time I called it quits I still was several miles from the ocean shore.  Sad.  Oh, a kid found a banana slug too and let me take a picture of it!

Anyways, the hike looked like this:

And this:

And this:

And this:

And this:

And this:

And this:

And this:

It was a long day, full of adventure, and I am glad that I went.  Yet throughout the day something was nagging at me, and by the end of it, as I nestled into my hotel room for the evening with my steak takeout dinner from Shamus T Bones, I realized what it was.  I was still missing that girl who I used to send passages to in the night that looked like this:

And of course, she made me happy, and our walks together looked like this:

And she made me laugh.

And so alone in that hotel room, in a moment of weakness or strength, I’m still not sure which, I picked up my phone, and I decided to call Jennifer.  And the phone rang, once, twice, three times…

“Hey, Jennifer…”

“Hi.  Ugh, my phone is at 1% and about to die, like always!”

And with that I heard the line cut out.  I waited for several minutes for her to call back.  Nothing.  I laid down on the hotel bed in the dim room and interchanged between closing my eyes and staring at the ceiling.  My eyes started to well up a bit.  And then the phone rang.

To be continued.

Cheers,

Rob