A supposedly dumb thing I'd do again.

I've been on vacation. You know all that footage of the horrible floods in Colorado?

Yeah. That's where My Guy and I were. Right there.

My Guy and I hiked for the 2 days prior to the "Holy Shit, The World is Ending" rainfall. We hiked during the "Damn, This is Annoying" rainfall. So, 2 days of poncho-wearing sexiness.

Actually, it was a day and a half of good-natured poncho-wearing sexiness, and half a day of soaked, exhausted, and muddy "Dear God, we're all going to die."

Do we know how to vacation or what?

We didn't really know what we were doing. We looked at the weather and all, but just decided to hike on anyway. We were kind of dumb - and extraordinarily lucky.

So, we got rained on. At one point, I asked My Guy if I looked like a drowned rat. He quickly responded, "Probably. I've never seen a drowned rat."

The man has a way with the ladies. Clearly.

About halfway through our second day of being outdoorsy, it started to rain harder. Luckily, this coincided with a) realizing that we'd taken the wrong trail; and b) getting on the correct trail, only to find that it was really steep and headed toward a destination that would suck due to the weather. Yay!

It was during this wet, uphill trek that My Guy made up for the drowned rat comment. Out of nowhere, he said, "You would've made a really good football player."

I stopped on the trail, mostly because I was looking for any excuse to rest my screaming quads. "What? Why?"

My husband studied me in my high-fashion, trash bag-esque poncho. "You have mental toughness."

And that, my friends? That's the best compliment ever.

That's the compliment that compelled me to keep hiking, even when I was exhausted and soaked, even when I started hallucinating that I was NFL great Franco Harris.

Much like Harris, the dreams of an entire town - nay, an entire Steeler nation - rested upon my shoulders. Like Harris, I sported an oversized coat/jacket/thing.

And like Harris, I had some mental toughness.

I shared this with My Guy. As we hiked on, we occasionally shouted out, "Franco Harris!" as a rallying cry.

Finally, we reached our target - a lake that supposedly has gorgeous mountain views.

We didn't see shit. We did, however, capture our triumph with this masterpiece of phone photography.

Nice finger there, honey.

Then, we ran down the mountain, becoming more and more dismayed at the flooded trail. By the time we reached the trailhead, we were exhausted and just over it and really rather delirious. Like, we discussed having Franco Harris over for dinner, should we survive our hiking ordeal. Like a Hall of Famer would agree to go to the home of some randoms who aren't even Steelers fans because they hallucinated about him while soaked to the bone and suffering from some sort of elevation-related delirium.

It could happen, right?

My Guy and I laughed and celebrated our mighty hiking triumph. We had no idea that come morning, the trail would be flooded and that entire section of the park would be closed.

Sometimes, being dumb offers a special kind of protective force field.

When have you experienced Dumb Force Field protection?

Images courtesy of sportsblink.com and Ione the iPhone.