Last Friday, I took Meredith out for dinner to celebrate us selling the house on Wednesday. I wanted to take her somewhere nice. A few months ago, I got a promotion in my e-mail from Restaurants.com where I could buy $25 gift cards for $2 each (the catch is that you have to spend $35 total at the restaurant), so I bought seven of them, three for restaurants I already know, and four for new (to me) places. I looked through the four new places, and they are all nice, but they also have fairly snooty menus with things I probably would not like to eat. One of them had a chicken dish, so that was where we went.

Richfield is a little town about 15 miles northwest of us, and I have never paid it too much attention. I called up the Richfield Taverne and made reservations for the outside patio, and we headed out that way. The Taverne is very nice – the inside is spacious and has an old-time feel, including a decorative tin ceiling. The patio was very pleasant, with only about ten tables. We both ordered the chicken dish, and enjoyed the evening air. The food was good, but not necessarily stunning. As we were finishing up eating, a duet set up and started playing light jazz, which was very fun. I was not enthusiastic about the dessert selection, but I needed to spend $2.00 more to get my discount, so we tried a chocolate-and-berry cake that turned out to be very good. Normally, I do not like chocolate and fruit mixed together, but this one had the fruit drizzled just on one end, so I was able to split most of it with Meredith. All in all, it was a good way to celebrate.

Saturday was “my day,” as long as we still made it to our two scheduled graduation parties. I wanted to check out a trail in the Valley that we had not yet tried, and so we headed off to the trailhead. The trail is called Wetmore, which I joked was probably a warning. It was. The trail was also primarily a horse trail, and it turned out to be over 5 miles long. And it was hot. Still, ignorant of the arduous walk ahead of us, we plunged in. At first, the major issue to watch out for was horse droppings, but then we got to the first very shallow stream we had to ford. No problem. Over the whole trail, we had to ford four or five streams, and none was very difficult, but they were usually very muddy on the banks. Mud kept cropping up on the trail, and the horses had churned it up quite a bit. Still, we kept on until we figured we were well over halfway back to the car. At that point, there was about a mile-long stretch that was more churned-up mud than dry ground, and we had a tough time picking our way along the side of the trail in an effort to stay dry and fairly clean.

We cleared the worst of the mud, and we ran into a very nice man whom we had seen at the start of our walk. He stopped to chat and found out where we’d parked, and informed us we were about halfway back to the car. I think he meant to be kind, but that came as a bit of a blow. The happy news is that the back half of the walk was fairly dry, but it compensated for that by being really hilly. We got back to the car tired and hot, and went back home to each take our second shower of the day.

We then headed to Silver Springs Park in Stow, a park not too far from where we live. There was a graduation party going on there, and we had never been to the park before. It turns out they have a great playground for little kids. Anyway, the party was in a pavilion and the food was great (burgers and such, with cookies and cupcakes). While we were eating, I saw two students come walking out of the woods, so I figured correctly that there was a trail in the park. Since it was a park, I figured that the trail must be fairly short. I was not doing too well on my figuring. We decided to give it a try, and the trail turned out to be over two miles long, with a few muddy sections, and Mer was in sandals. We ran into another kind man who helped us choose the right paths to get back to the party, and 40 minutes after we set out we got back in time to have some cake, which had been cut while we were walking. All in all, I figured we walked about 7-8 miles on Saturday, in addition to the 12 miles I ran in the morning. I was pretty tired.

We then went to a second grad party that was very close by. It was at the house of a colleague, and we had some good food and a good visit with a teacher friend. We were also entertained by the casual but competitive all-ages volleyball game that went on the entire time we were there. We then went home, full and tired.