The Knight in the Shining Lucy

This is a picture of L jumping for joy as SMS, in Lucy the Silver Bullet, pulled up to the parking lot at the Fryman Canyon overlook today.

"Why was she jumping for joy?" you ask.
Because we were stuck there and SMS came to rescue us.

"How did that happen?" you ask.
It started innocently enough.

For a few weeks L and I had been toying with the idea of changing up our hiking route. Typically we hike Wilacre Park: we enter off of Fryman Road, near Laurel Canyon, and we exit on Iredell. It takes us about 50-minutes to do the whole loop. We have known for a while that there is a "second part" to this hike off of Iredell that takes you up to Mulholland Drive, so today, L brought snacks and we gave it a try. It was more strenuous and more desolate than our typical route, and we liked that. However, there were far fewer markings than we expected and a lot more "up-and-down" rather than the "up-up-up" we expected, but we ran into a few nice people and a few cute dogs and even spent a little time in a rain forest!














It was a nice hike all around, but when we reached Mulholland, an hour and fifty minutes after we started, we realized we were pretty much stuck up there. We had a few options:

1. Try to go back the way we came (we weren't sure we'd be able to find our way),
   
2. Try to go back another way that some other hikers recommended (we weren't sure we'd be able to find their way),
   
3. Ask a "normal" looking person for a ride down the hill (against our better judgement and the advice of our both of our mothers),
4. Walk along Mulholland, in either direction, to try to find a more direct way back to our cars,
5. Call my husband, L's boyfriend or a cab!

We actually decided on a combination of the two. We thought we had a good chance of making it back to the car via Mulholland and Laurel Canyon, so we headed off on foot only to get scared by a couple of hairpin turns that left us blind to oncoming traffic. I decided to text SMS to warn him we'd be about an hour late due to the fact that we got a little bit "lost," or, more accurately, "stuck." Thankfully he offered to come get us and that's why you see L jumping for joy above.

The whole experience reminded me of a time at Long Lake Camp when, in the summer of 1990 or 1991, Bruce, the Australian rocketry counselor (yes, there was a rocketry counselor, and a circus program!) took us for a hike on which we got lost, all the while hearing the whir of cars on the highway nearby, but not being able to get to the road. Eventually, somehow, the camp director showed up in a school bus to get us. He was none to happy with Bruce and I remember we really weren't allowed to joke about it that summer.

Before today I'm not sure I would have believed that you could get lost in a park in LA. Granted, we weren't lost, we knew where we were and where we wanted to go, we just couldn't figure out how to do it, but I was afraid if we tried to go back the way we came we would get lost and I wasn't willing to take that chance.

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In other news, someone stole our New York Times today (bummer!) and part of my bumper is no longer attached to my car (major bummer!). I'll have to deal with that tomorrow.

Still not working and no interviews scheduled.

Strange place this Los Angeles, strange, strange place.