Rainy Memorial Day

So Net was just dying to go on a walk since yesterday and had me (Mike) hunting for places to go. I didn't find a whole lot, but Net came up with the idea of walking to the Cherry Creek reservoir on the Southeast edge of Denver. I checked the weather.com website and it appeared that the rain wouldn't start until the late afternoon, so we didn't worry about umbrellas or anything like that. We left at about 10:30 in the morning and started at Dartmouth and Havana down the Cherry Creek trail at that point.

It was very fun at first. The trail was very nice. It felt like we were in the woods, but were still close to the city. Net wasn't sure we were going the right way and wanted me to ask for directions (but I didn't want to bother the bikers). So Net asks this guy as he was passing for directions at this corner. He tried to stop after the turn, but fell off his bike! I felt really sorry for the guy. We went the same direction I was wanting to go anyway, but felt really bad since it took that guy a long time to get back up...

This trail was pretty good exercise, since you have a lot of up and down to get to the top and the bottom of the reservoir. Once we started getting into the park we felt little trickles of rain, not too big of a deal. The rain slowly came down harder and harder until eventually it was really pouring down. At that point we were desperately trying to find some shelter. We finally spotted a shelter with some other families in it and ran inside. The other families got there by driving into the park, which maybe we should have done, but then we wouldn't have had all the good exercise or this fun story!

Even though we were under the shelter, there was a strong wind that blew the rain water in our faces. I remember some scout camps where we had to sleep in storms like this, and it wasn't fun!

The rain was so bad we couldn't go anywhere, so we broke out the lunch Net made and started eating. It turns out Net left our peanut butter sandwiches at home so we were eating apples and crackers. One of the families had pity on us and brought some hot dogs over for us, which made Net very happy since American snacks just don't cut it for her (she really likes hot dogs).

We sat there shivering in the cold, waiting for quite a while for all the rain and thunder to stop. After a while, the thunder stopped, and the rain lessened some, but was still pouring down pretty hard. After we had been in that shelter an hour or two, the three of us got bored enough that we started walking back up the reservoir in heavy rain. It turns out that we wouldn't have been as wet if we had waited a few more minutes, but it made for some good pictures. After we were at the top of the reservoir, the rain stopped, and we were able to mostly dry off on the way back.

It was about 2:30 when we finally rolled back into our home sweet home.

Today was definitely a very "memorial" day!

Below are the pictures we took. It's too bad that in these pictures you can't see the rain coming down, or the fact that we were in the middle of a thunderstorm. You can see how wet I am in some of these pictures.