Today, Chris’s parents, Chris, and I spent the day exploring Lake Placid, walking around Mirror Lake, wine tasting at wineries that had grapes from the Finger Lakes, and finally hiking up Mount Jo, a popular mountain in the Adirondacks. Going up, while strenuous, was a straight one-mile hike, with some muddiness, wetness, and a lot of rocks. I was hesitant at first to suggest it since I wasn’t sure how comfortable his parents would be, but Chris insisted we do it, and they were pretty willing and were really positive about it the whole time despite being challenged by certain rocks and slippery areas.

Going down was another story. There are two trails to get up and down the mountain – the short trail, which is steeper and rockier that we took, and then the longer trail, which is supposedly flatter and easier. We took the short route up and decided to follow the fellow hikers in front of us and took the long trail down. Somewhere along the way, we lost them because they were going to fast, and we ended up at a stream that went straight down. I knew we were not jumping down this stream to get back to the parking lot. We ended up hiking all the way back up to the intersection of the long and short trail and hiking down the short trail to get back down, racing against the clock since the sun was slowly but surely setting. In the end, we were all fine and relieved to get back before dark. Chris’s parents were such good sports about it and even joked about it on and off throughout the rest of the evening; I think the muddiness bothered his dad more than getting lost and potentially spending the night at the top of a mountain.

I imagined this situation happening with my parents, and I know for a fact they never would have taken it as well as Chris’s parents did and probably would have yelled at me. They’d probably hold it against me and never let me hear the end of it. That’s usually what happens when we do something “bad” in our family. We’re never allowed to forget it, and then constantly get reminded of our blunders years and years later when it was so long ago that we ourselves have forgotten.