Monday — never an easy time for the outdoors enthusiast. After a weekend of adventure, returning to the humdrum work-a-day world can make one melancholy. To help ease the transition, every Monday we feature a 90 Second Escape — essentially, a 90-second video of a place you’d probably rather be: a trail, a park, a greenway, a lake … anywhere as long as it’s not under a fluorescent bulb.

Today’s 90-Second Escape: Paddling Bush Creek at Jordan Lake.

I didn’t have time Saturday for an all-day adventure — there were leaves to rake before the big municipal sucking machine paid was to pay a visit in the coming week. But I did have time to sneak away for three or four hours. Could I find a true adventure in such a small window?

Of course.

Adventure is all around, I discovered within a week of moving into our house in Historic (1970s) Cary nearly four years ago. At the end of the cul-de-sac was a small creek that fed into Walnut Creek, which divided a lush floodplain forest maybe 75 yards wide, blotting out I-40 to the northeast and our development to the southwest. This unlikely wild spot was good for two hours of adventure, minimum.

Saturday, I sought out an equally unlikely wild spot: Jordan Lake. To the casual lake user, Jordan Lake is a playground for speedboats. A wilderness adventure? Here? Study a map of this U.S. Army Corps of Engineers water containment project and you’ll see that off its main component are various fingers that taper into marshes and creeks, areas just waiting to be explored. I put my rake in the tool shed, put the Old Town Loon 100 on the roof rack and was off to explore one of those fingers: Bush Creek.

Spend 90 seconds with me now to explore Bush Creek. Come back later in the week and I’ll tell you more about the adventure.