I had my first MNO (moms night out) today. One would assume my MNO was an evening trip to see the new Sex and the City movie, but that would have been fun and sensible. Instead, I got up at 6:30 to go for a mountain bike ride. We had planned to ride the Mustang Trail (aka the Latenight Loop) in the Cottonwood Valley Trail System, but we got horribly lost. I think the 7-mile easy loop should have taken 45 minutes, but after almost two hours we crested a hill and saw Red Rock. We knew we weren’t supposed to be anywhere near Red Rock so we made the hard decision to backtrack to the road we saw at the bottom of the hill. We figured we’d just ride back to our cars along the road to keep things easy. So we stopped a dude on the road and ask him how to get to Blue Diamond. “You’re in Blue Diamond,” he says. Huh? I explain that we’re looking for Blue Diamond Road and he tells me we’re in the town of Blue Diamond and that it would be a very long road ride back or just two miles back the way we came to reach familiar territory.

Fortunately there was a kiddie triathlon going on so we grabbed some free water and watched the awards ceremony while hydrating. Blue Diamond is quite a cute little town. My friend decided to stay in Blue Diamond and have her husband pick her up there. I decided to try my luck finding my way back to the car. I made the mistake of asking the first old dude I saw on the trail if I was headed the right way and he said I had a long way to go. “You really should have started out earlier in the day.” Um, well I started out at three hours ago when it was only 75 degrees, old dude.

I soon saw Blue Diamond Road and followed alongside on the trail heading west for a bit, but felt like my car was probably behind me to the east so I crawled under a barbed wire fence and through some bushes to the road. Unfortunately (and not surprisingly) my instincts were off and after a couple miles I passed the “Entering Red Rock Conservation Area” sign and realized I’d gone the wrong way. I was probably only a couple miles from my car at one point, but now that I was five miles downhill from my car, I just kept going a couple more miles to a gas station and called Dan and Brandt to come rescue me.

I was embarrassed about giving up at the end, but our green ride turned into a black diamond ride so for that I feel pretty badass. And I fell once and have the toughest looking bruise to show off now.