Torrey Pines State Reserve

Did you know that the Torrey Pine is the rarest native pine in the United States? And to think that I thought it was just what my little sister Tracie did for her ex-boyfriend. (She's pined for Tory for over a year now. Get over him already! You are as pathetic as your older brother!)

Last weekend I went to Torrey Pines State Reserve and did some hiking. I was on a mission to cover a lot of ground and I ended up getting in a 10 mile hike. Along the way I ran into a family that was geo-caching and stopped to help them as they were about to find a cache. It would have been my first! But, they couldn't find it (it was a micro-cache so hard to spot). I was bummed. :-(

I hiked a little more and was checking out a map kiosk when some women asked my opinion on a trail. Even though I had never been there before and tried to get away, the next thing I knew I was hiking with 5 crazy sisters in their 40s and 50s...and they were entertaining me with stories of their families, their children, their halloween, their running, their triathalons, their anything and everything. They truly adopted me as one of their own and took what would have been a solitary day at the park and the beach and turned it into a social event. They were actually very cool and kept cracking me up with their stories and how comfortable they seemed blabbing to me. They admitted that they were a few days into a family reunion and desperate for an outsider to break the monotony. So they latched onto "Mountain Goat Man"/"Tbone"/"Terry" as they would alternatively refer to me as. They insisted I pose in their pictures and they insisted that I take a couple of them.



When we got down to the beach one of them started talking about "Flat Stanley" and that reminded me of my own token that I had brought along...my beaver hat. So, I pulled it out of my knapsack and they hammed it up for a couple more photos before they headed back to the parking lot.

I left them as I headed for Blacks Beach...but I wished we could have hiked together longer. I enjoyed my brush with the sisterhood of the traveling hats. As strange as it was, their welcoming of me made me feel less homesick.