Yesterday, Wednesday, was a beautiful day. It has been hot here, and the heat finally gave way to temperatures in the seventies. I could not stand the idea of not being out in “the nature,” so Mer and headed over to nearby Twinsburg, to the Center Valley Trail, on which we had never been. The main trail of the Center Valley Trail is paved, and about a mile-and-a-half long, but there are lots of side trails into the woods, and Tinker’s Creek runs through the park. The park is surrounded by housing developments and schools and roads, but it does a great job of making you feel isolated from all of that.

We had a ton of rain last week, and Tinker’s Creek was swollen. That was pretty, but meant that two of the main side trails were closed because of high water. We did find a pretty trail that meandered through the woods on high ground that was dry right up to the last ten feet, where we had to pick our way along through a muddy area. We also jumped on a side trail that I thought would take us to the north end of the paved trail, but I kept getting distracted by interesting other trails. We came out on the paved trail, and I was feeling smug until I saw a sign that identified the bridge over Tinker’s Creek as the South Bridge, near where we’d started. Ooops. We retraced our steps along the paved trail, and finished up the hike to the end of the trail, where we turned and headed back to the car. In all, we were hiking for about two hours, which was a wonderful escape in the middle of the week.

When we got home, we ate supper and watched an episode of the TV show Lost. We followed that with a game night – I challenged Mer to Trivial Pursuit – Book Lovers’ Edition. Mer has her master’s degree in English and reads all the time, so when after fifteen minutes we had only answered two questions correctly between both of us, I decided the game was too hard to be entertaining, so we quit and switched gears to True Math, a game about math. I did win, but not by so much as I would have hoped, being a math and science nerd going way back.