Do you remember the stories that your grandfather probably told you about walking to school everyday, through the snow barefoot, uphill both ways? Well, today I have one of those stories, but it’s 100% true and it just happened to me, today. I thought it would be fun to go hiking with my son today at Moana Wiliwili. We drove to Kailua, Oahu. Anyway, I wasn’t sure if it has been rainy in Kailua so I wore flip-flop shoes. I made some major mistakes when we got there. The 1st mistake I made was that I forgot to bring water. The next major mistake I made was that I forgot the mosquito spray in the car.
We started walking and about ¬Ω mile into the walk we realized that it was really muddy. It was then that my son started complaining about not liking mud and every time we stopped for him to whine about not wanting to walk in the mud, mosquitoes would start biting us so bad that I smacked my leg and killed 5 mosquitoes at once. So for the first 1.8 miles I carried him on my shoulders, uphill, through the mud. When we arrived at the waterfall people were jumping off cliffs into the water, so we took a break to cool down our feet in the cold water.
Before long we decided to start walking back and once again he started complaining about not wanting to get muddy and once again I ended up carrying him on my shoulders. This time we were going downhill, but it was really muddy and slippery and I had a 40lb child on my shoulders. I ended up getting my flip-flops stuck in the mud where I couldn’t get them out, so I ended up walking the next 1.8 miles, through the jungle, down muddy hills, barefoot. We were about ¼ of the way down and I stepped on a metal stake that was buried in the mud. I still kept carrying him on my shoulders, but the pain was pretty severe and I was leaving a blood trail down the muddy path. Before long the mud was so packed into the cut that it burned like hell, but at least the bleeding stopped. We walked a while further and I was able to soak my feet in the cold stream to wash the mud out of the cut on the bottom of my foot. Once we got ½ way down the hill, my son got so heavy on my shoulders that I just couldn’t carry him anymore and I was so thirsty I felt like I was foaming at the mouth with extreme cotton mouth. We worked our way ever so slowly down the path, but my feet were hurting so bad because of walking on rocks, sticks, and through hard walking woods with slippery mud. Once we got to the bottom of the trail we trespassed, on the person who owns a house back in the woods, driveway. You would think that walking barefoot down a driveway would feel better than walking over rocks, sticks, and through the mud, but this driveway felt like coarse sandpaper on my feet. By the time we made it back to the car I was so physically tired and dehydrated that when I drove to the nearest 7-11 to buy a bottle of water, I thought I was going to puke from drinking it so fast. On the drive home I called my Dad and he was laughing so hard that I knew this sounded like one of those stories my grandfather used to tell me.