I'm SOOOOO brave!

This is a picture looking towards the summit of Mt. Hood. Before today, I'd never been up to the mountain.

All summer long, my handsome friend has tried to talk me into an adventure up here. Mind you, what he was proposing, was not an extreme adventure. A nice drive up to Timberline lodge, touching snow, eating lunch, and taking a ski lift up to an observation point on the mountain. I resisted, I thought of other ideas, I let him oversleep, I avoided and all because I'm afraid of heights. Ski lifts scare me. That's super dorky, I know but I can't help it...always have been.

However, our Monday adventures are quickly coming to an end, in fact we've only one left, I had no more good reasons not to go.

(That's not to say that I didn't try. I even suggested laying around in bed all day. Now, this suggestion while one I'm sure he would appreciate doesn't work at all because he knows full well that it's something I am incapable of doing. I might offer, and he might want to take me up on it, but I can't follow through.)

So, we went. Drove up on a mostly cloudy crappy day. He predicted that the clouds would burn off or, even better that from Timberline we would be above the clouds looking over them down into the valley. He was right.

We had lunch, tasty and stately in the heavy feeling rock dining room at Timberline.

Then we walked towards the ski lift. I balked. It looked like a long way to the top. It looked like a long way off the ground. It was dumb, but I was afraid of the ski lift.

"I've got to watch it for a few minutes."
So we did.

It seemed silly not to go.
I couldn't see any sort of safety bar.
I knew he really wanted to go.
I wasn't sure that was a good enough reason for me.

"You convince me to do all sorts of new things," said my handsome friend as he stood behind me with his hands upon my shoulders.

He's right. I do...all the time. And he's such a damn good sport. So, I did. And it was super scary on the way up, and not so bad on the way down. The valley stretched below us, clouds at our feet obscuring our view. There was snow on the ground, skiers flying past us and a funny Japanese couple with self portrait device that looked like a modified golf club. It was sunny and warm and I felt very brave.

Silly.
And loved.
And brave.