Weekend Walk on the Tacoma Nature Trail

This past weekend was gorgeous. Mid seventies up to eighties. 0% chance of rain (which is rare out here!). Finally, as the weather warms up we are getting a chance to enjoy Washington's beautiful outdoors. We have so much on our to do list of outdoor activities, but this week we started small.

Saturday we took a hike. Well...it was more of a walk. We had planned on a 5 mile hike deep in the woods, but it was my husband's turn to carry his shop's emergency duty phone which meant if he got a call he had an hour to get to it and being 5 miles in the woods wouldn't work. So, instead of our initially planned hiking location (coming soon!) we went to the Tacoma Nature Center.

It was nice to be out in the woods, even if it was only for an hour (about 2 miles). We looped around Snake Lake. I had read about it in a hiking book and was led to believe that it is a "moderate" trail on the ranking of difficulty...but...apparently we are a lot more hard core woodsy than we realized. Some parts of the trail were very pretty, but unfortunately the trail runs along the highway. It is hard to feel like you are enjoying the wilderness with car-noise in the back ground. Very little incline and overall un-treacherous trail. I guess it would be a fantastic place to go with little kids, but for two outdoorsy adults it was a little disappointing.

We did enjoy the weather. The sound of birds is always nice. We looked at the pond and admired the very tall trees. I picked a huge bunch of wild flowers. JoJo patiently stopped and waiting every time I made a stop to pluck some sort of fern. We talked. We saw a nasty giant ant mound (they are everywhere in Washington. It's scary). We followed a trail of ants. And on the way home, we stopped and had half-off Frappuccinos from Starbucks.

Overall, it was a lovely little Saturday date.