Black Cherry Limeade

It is hot.  It is so horribly, wretchedly hot outside that the moment you walk out the door you feel the need to shower, preferrably with ice cold water.  Most people, who are sane, will refrain from doing outdoor activities in this heat but not when your best friend in the whole wide world is in town with her two adorable children who want to go paddleboating.  No not then!  So yesterday, my BFF and I took the kiddo's paddleboating during a extreme heat advisory.  The humidity was like 120%, the sun was hitting us from all directions as it blazed from above and reflected back off the water from below.  There was not a breeze or cloud or shade in site and yet there we were paddling away, or I should say there Alicia was paddling away with her son who decided he wanted to help paddle the boats this year since last year, when we first took them out, he was too short to reach the peddles.  I believe Alicia and I were ready get the hell out of the lake about 5 minutes after starting.  The kids lasted about 15 minutes.  Once we had all decided to get the heck off the darn, stinking, spider-ridden, hotter then hades paddleboat it was a race to the dock and more importantly, the air conditioned car.  Of course it was at this point when her son saw two spiders down by his feet, and clearly terrorized (he had just in some strange omen been explaining the horrible death that occurs from a Black Widow spider bite while we were waiting in line to get on the boats) his feet, it seemed, could no longer work the paddles.  This left poor Alicia to get us back before we all died of heat stroke.  She was huffing and puffing, clearly exhausted beyond belief and looking as if she had fallen into the lake, but she got us back to the dock and into the air conditioned car in record time where we all chugged gallons of water and complained about how hot it was, like we were surprised or something.  It was pretty darn fun actually, heat stroke and all!!! 

Today, having learned my lesson, I will not be stepping one foot outside my nice, air conditioned home.  I will lounge around, catch up on some reading, some tv watching and all I need is a nice, cool refreshing beverage to get me through the day.  I am tired of lemonade.  We are hard core lemonade drinkers in this house.  I wanted something different and a Black Cherry Limeade sounded like it was the perfect drink for a day like today and believe me it was! 

Black Cherry Limeade - adapted from missamy on thepioneerwoman.com Tasty Kitchen

Ingredients:

2/3 cup sugar

2/3 cup water

1/2 cup Lime Juice

1-1/2 cups Black Cherry Juice, no sugar added

2 cups Club Soda

Directions:

1.  Heat the sugar and water on medium heat until dissolved into a simple syrup, set aside to cool.

2.  Add the lime juice, black cherry juice and cooled simple syrup into a pitcher and stir.

3.  Add the club soda when ready to serve so the fizz doesn't go flat on you.