Today Jeff and I went for a walk around Burnaby Lake, the first time I’ve been there in over two months and since The Big Blow of 2015. It was cooler than August but not really wetter, if you don’t count the lush athletic fields being giant sponges of water.
I wore my newish Peregrine 5 runners to give them another testing and they clearly do not get along with my weird left foot, as said foot started hurting almost right away. This makes me sad because I hate shopping for shoes. The pain was more annoying than anything, at least.
As we approached Hume Park, Jeff pulled out his iPhone and began setting about finding a nearby geocache, which are basically little goodies stashed away outdoors and contain sheets you can use to record that you have found the cache. The first one Jeff found was the weirdest, a wooden stickman that looked like a prop from The Blair Witch Project. Here I am holding it with my best goofy face on:
Jeff ended up finding five others but none came close to the clever and odd design of the stickman. They were mostly water-logged sheets of paper rolled up inside leaky pill bottles.
We looked for a few caches along the Brunette River but didn’t have much luck there. We did notice the river was replete with salmon returning to the lake to spawn and die, as is their tragic lot on life. Many were quite big. Others were big and dead. And stinky. We didn’t linger.
Less stinky were a bunch of ducks near another geocache at the lake. I have never before observed a group of ducks all lined up on a tree branch before. I have now:
We also watched as a gaggle of geese nearly flew into someone’s model airplane buzzing over the athletic field and enjoyed the newly resurfaced stretch of trail starting near Silver Creek. This has always been my least favorite part of the lake trail for runs, as it is very uneven and has steep sides that all but whisper, “C’mere and twist your ankle!” No more! It is now a smooth pedestrian superhighway. I expect erosion will take care of this in time but for now it’s a nice improvement. It also looks conspicuously unnatural.
Alas, by the time we reached the halfway point of our journey ’round the lake we both had sore feet and elected to take the SkyTrain back from the Sperling/Burnaby Lake station. We still covered about 11 km, though, so not too shabby for my first real walk in months.
Next time I’ll don better footwear or use some kind of magical orthopedic device that will make my left foot feel happy and non-hurting. I hate that foot.
