I am fascinated by the fat volcano a couple of miles away from my front door. Not very many people have volcanoes right outside their front door. Except probably Satan. But I promise that's the only thing I have in common with Satan, except that we both finished in the top two of my high school's student body president voting my junior year.
After a couple months of exploring, I figured out that you can run from my house to the rim of the volcano crater using mostly trails and dirt roads, as long as you're willing to inhale a lot spider webs and be nice to the guys with machetes chopping corn stalks and jungle vegetation. Last week, I finally reached the crater rim, and then I decided to see if you can actually cirumambulate the rim on a trail that I'd heard was there (and by "I'd heard it was there," I mean I asked an old lady selling water at a little stand at the crater rim if someone could run around the rim, and she said, yes, but it's not recommended, and I said, oh, gangs? and she said, no, drop-offs. And I thought, I can handle drop-offs with my dexterity, whereas I cannot handle firearms with my dexterity).
The trail was super pretty, and not really that dangerous, and I almost made it all the way back to where I started, except that about a mile from completing the circle the trail suddenly hit a barbed wire fence with a No Trespassing sign, so I took a trail in a different direction. But after a half mile there was a guy swinging his machete at some plants. He smiled at me and said, "These are my vegetables! You have to go another way." And I was like, "OK." Guy with a sword is always more right than guy with a hydration pack.
So I backtracked but couldn't find any other routes, so I went ahead and just climbed through the barbed wire fence back at the original junction. After a little ways there was a big, rich guy's house up the hill and his dog started barking at me, and he came out on his deck, and I was like, "I'm lost, where's the park?" So he directed me through another barbed wire fence, where I picked up some other trail, which shunted me through thick jungle and, literally, right onto the porch of a little jungle shack where three people were hanging out. "Hi, I'm lost," I said. "No you're not," said one of the guys, and he showed me how the trail goes essentially through their house and out the other side, and sure enough, about a mile down the trail I was back at the point on the rim where I'd started. Easy peezy lemon squeezy.