Keeping busy in Cleveland: Huntington Beach & night hiking

Satinder Kaur is a student in Weatherhead's MBA program.

Welcome back! It's so much fun to be a student again after a short stint of interning. I cherish these moments of my life time and again.

There are many new students on campus looking to make a difference in their lives and to live up to their dreams. I whole-heartedly welcome each one of you and wish you very good luck for your future endeavors.

Cleveland has a lot to offer at this time, and I am so excited to be back. I would like to write about a couple of outings I went on recently. Four of my friends and I went to Huntington Beach in Bay Village, about 20 miles from here. It is one of the coolest beaches I have seen in the U.S. after Florida’s Clearwater Beach. I am sure there are other beaches that are as good or better, but the gravel sand with clear blue water at Huntington made it exceptionally beautiful. After witnessing the splendid sunset, we all headed to Bombay Chaat. Indeed it's one of best places to have Indian spicy food. We ordered chicken tikka biryani, chole bhuture, papdi chaat, garlic naan and more. It was super fun and a day well spent.

Last week, I went to Rocky River Nature Center for hiking, and guess what? It was "night hiking." I joined this hiking club on Meetup. The club has around 2,000 Clevelanders who do fun things every weekend. In my hiking group there were around 50-60 participants from every walk of life (kids, young men/ women and senior people). We all started with one goal and that was to see the harvest full moon while enjoying the misty weather. After an hour of walking through different trails (easy and hard), we finally saw the moon under the clouds. I can’t express the wonderful feeling of accomplishment we all had at that moment. It was an open sky, quiet night, and everything was so still, just the sound of small insects talking to each other. We all stopped for some time in the park and witnessed that magical moment.

I have some cool stuff lined up for the coming weekend, and I hope that you too will have a great weekend ahead. There is so much to do in Cleveland that I never feel it’s a small city.