An interesting Wednesday Walkers group hike yesterday. I’ll get to that in a minute and share some photos from the day. But first, let’s talk about the beer!

Another good night of drinking, this time at Dive In with Jessa and the girls. I do enjoy Jessa’s company, but then again, I only see her once a week. Maybe that’s the secret! Had some beers, bought some lady drinks, played some pool, and fed the girls some pizza. Good times! When it came time for me to move on towards the house, I popped into The Pub for my weekly fix of chicken wings.

After eating my fill, I headed upstairs and slept the peaceful sleep of the inebriated.

Speaking of being a drunk bastard, I came across this article today, which claims that ANY amount of alcohol causes damage to the brain. Well, in all seriousness, I have seen some deterioration in my cognitive abilities lately. These mostly manifest in small but irritating ways–frequent typos and misspellings, forgetfulness, and an occasional lack of clarity in my thought processes–sort of a fuzzy feeling in my head. Now, I’m 65 years old and some of this is likely just the natural decline that comes with aging. Maybe if I were still a working man I’d worry about it more. I’m retired and enjoying my life. And some of that enjoyment comes from downing a frosty cold bottle of beer or three. So, if I’m destined to become Biden-like and beer hastens my journey to dementia, so be it.

And here’s the bottom line:

Alright, now where was I? Oh yeah, the Wednesday hike. Our intention was to hike up to the Kalaklan ridge using a route we hadn’t taken recently. Our efforts were stymied initially by a locked gate, and later by a recently constructed fence. We eventually found an alternative way up, but then discovered we were somehow fenced in. No one was willing to retreat back down the steep trail we had just climbed, so we wandered around some looking of an opening in the fence. And then we encountered an old woman carrying a bolo knife (machete) who was not at all happy about our presence on “her land.” We explained we were just hiking through but she was having none of it. We tried to ignore her but she continued to follow us around yelling stuff in Tagalog. We had a couple of Filipinas with us and they translated that she was saying that previous hikers had damaged her fence (no doubt looking for a way out). She finally offered to escort us to “the gate.” With no other obvious option (other than damaging the fence) we reluctantly let her lead us partially down the mountain, where she unlocked the gate and pointed for us depart. I tried to give her a bag of cookies as a peace offering, but she refused and gestured for me to get off her land. And that is just what we did. Then we reclimbed the mountain on the other side of her fence and made it up to the ridge road with no further problems.

Here are some photos from the hike:

And that was my Wednesday.