Adventure

The idea in heading to Shawnee Mission Park was to fly rockets. But it was too windy.



So we flew kites.



Then Em asked if we could go walk the trails.



She had her BFF along or she'd have claimed I was violating her human rights by offering a trail hike. As it was, they were giddy to do just about anything.



We saw this guy flying a two-line sport kite. A big one, at times he had to really lean back. Gave me sore muscles just watching it.


Kite Workout from Chixulub on Vimeo.

So then we went to the trails. We were going to take the purple and yellow trails, though all we'd done in the past was the purple. At the point where they diverge, I looked at the map and it appeared that the two trails were about equal in length, so it seemed doable.



And it might be doable with a less squirrelly set of kids. Between Mo's tendency to cover her eyes while she walks when she's excited (which does wonders for your footing on a stony trail) and Em and her friend stopping every twelve steps to interpret rocks (I agree one did look like a whale, but these two, it was like the world was one big Rorschach test).



We did the first leg of the Purple to where it intersects with the yellow. Chatted with a lovely mountain biker for a minute, then set off on the yellow.



We heard sirens nearby. Sirens to beat the band. As if someone hadn't just called the police, but had somehow called all police to the park. And firetrucks from the sound of some of the horn blasts.



Then Em realized she didn't have her phone anymore. And started backtracking, looking for it. I dialed it hoping the ring would help locate the phone. Someone answered, 'I found this phone in the woods at Shawnee Mission Park.'



Yeah, we're in the woods, just noticed it missing.

Fortunately she was by the dam, and so was my car. I described it for her, white Honda accord, autism awareness magnet, Crayola scribbles on it from a night when my autistic daughter got up in the night more quietly than usual.

I asked what all the sirens were, and she said she didn't know, but that there were emergency vehicles all over the place.

We resumed our walk. And the yellow trail turned out to be a doozy. Not as rough as the purple, not as 'technical' for a mountain biker, but long.

We had fun trying to smash hedge apples by throwing them against trees. This is harder than it looks like it would be.



I understand the tree is technically an Osage orange tree, but these things are even less like oranges than they are like apples. I gather you can eat the seeds if you strip away the membrane around them, but I don't think it looks like a very appetizing prospect.



When we got near an exit from the trails, and I looked at my clock and realized we'd been wandering in the wilderness for an hour and a half, we bailed out and took the paved path back to the car.



There were still several cop cars parked near us, and as we approached the car, I noticed...well, I noticed a body bag on the shore of the lake. And cops doing cop things, mainly standing around, but one had blue gloves on and was doing something with a suitcase of equipment.



I thought it was pretty freaky, but the girls were unfazed. 'They're probably going to send that to the forensics lab,' Em's friend observed. She's convinced she wants to be a forensic pathologist when she grows up, so I guess it's a comprehensible statement. But I'm like, That's a human being in that bag. Someone's Mom or Dad or brother or sister. It's not cool or entertaining.



According to the news, the guy was a fisherman who apparently drowned. Tragically, I saw no indication that the guy took $90 million in pay for mismanaging so much debt that the world's economic system was nearly destroyed. Given the frailty of human life, it's a pity that deserve has so little to do with these things.