The Detour

We planned to cap off my birthday celebrations with a hike up Old Rag Mountain in the Shenandoah today...but plans changed!

Serendipity meant that we had the new GPS that JJ got for my birthday, and all the food and water for an eight hour outing, and hiking shoes, and, just in case of emergency, a cell phone.

When we got to Manassas, the "tire failure" indicator lit up: that meant we needed to get Scooter to a Mini dealer. So long as we drove under 50 mph, we'd be okay...As luck would have it, the GPS gave us a non-highway routing to the Mini dealership (most of you recall that the Mini has exotic runflat tires that are hard to find and not even all Mini dealers have them, and the car needs to be flat-towed, and only to a Mini dealer, to fix it), and while there was no one there, we could leave the car.

The GPS then let us look up the locations and phone numbers of all the Enterprise ("We pick you up") rentacar locations, all of which were closed . And we were way out past Dulles airport, transit not an option really.

JJ looked at me and said, "Well, we could walk home. It's only 24 miles. We have food. We have water. And the Western and Old Dominion bike/walking trail is very close to here." (The last few pix on my Birthday Page -- picture 27 onwards -- are from that part of the trip.)

So off we went, for a very different kind of hike than we had set out for. We hiked for a few hours and then decided we had other things we wanted to do with the day than trudge along a less-than-scenic (though well-maintained) bike path underneath a line of high-tension wires...but came home and enjoyed an unexpected afternoon together.

My horoscope for the day had references to "unexpected road" and something going "flat", and that made us both laugh!