A nice holiday, but now back to the grindstone...sorta
I got back from Kentucky tuesday night, at around 10 pm....it was a long drive. Most notably, Ohio has got to be one of the most unnotable places to drive through on a highway. It is perfectly flat, there is nothing interesting to see. It's the kind of driving that makes you wonder if you're actually tired or just being mesmerized by the same scenery passing by for 4 hours. The only interesting thing I can recall from the drive is seeing the General Electric Aviation headquarters....it is HUGE! It is at least 2 km long along the highway. My friend and I were astonished at how big it was.
Other than the drives, the weekend was amazing. We arrived at our camp site at 4:30 AM Friday morning, and slept until 9 or so when a bulldozer drove by making lots of noise, and then started digging up the ground not far from where we were sleeping. Not surprisingly, we moved to another camp site, where several of our friends were already set up. We thought it would be a great idea to carry our tents fully set up to the new sites, which worked fine, but then we let them sit there while we grabbed other stuff, and a sudden gust of wind carried our empty tents into the river!!!! haha. There will be photos of these things to follow of course.
We eventually got climbing. It'd be silly and boring for me to describe all the climbs that we did. They were awesome. I took a bunch of photos of my friends climbing from the middle of neighbouring routes, so I will post some of them soon. In terms of camping, we pretty much ate like kings....nice healthy dinners, great pasta, steaks, decent sandwiches for lunch, pizza at Miguel's...ah, the benefits of car camping!
Other things of note are that I learned several important skills. I learned how to properly clean up a route (remove all gear) after we're done with it, how to rappel (using a prusek knot), and how to properly set quickdraws while climbing. I lead my first outdoor climb, it was a 5.10a with a really big last move, pretty high up above the last bolt, so a fall from there would have been long. It was also great getting used to climbing outdoors and learning how to read the handholds. A lot of the time, a place that seemed like it might be a good hold ended up being a piece of crap, and all the chalk smeared on it only threw me off more!
In other news, CC is going away for 3 months!!! :-( She's going to do some field work in Washington or Oregon, counting birds in some wildlife reserve or something. There will probably be limited access to phone and/or internet, which really does suck. It's going to be pretty rough! But possibly it will help me finish my masters!
Anyway, stay tuned for photos from Kentucky.
GS
Other than the drives, the weekend was amazing. We arrived at our camp site at 4:30 AM Friday morning, and slept until 9 or so when a bulldozer drove by making lots of noise, and then started digging up the ground not far from where we were sleeping. Not surprisingly, we moved to another camp site, where several of our friends were already set up. We thought it would be a great idea to carry our tents fully set up to the new sites, which worked fine, but then we let them sit there while we grabbed other stuff, and a sudden gust of wind carried our empty tents into the river!!!! haha. There will be photos of these things to follow of course.
We eventually got climbing. It'd be silly and boring for me to describe all the climbs that we did. They were awesome. I took a bunch of photos of my friends climbing from the middle of neighbouring routes, so I will post some of them soon. In terms of camping, we pretty much ate like kings....nice healthy dinners, great pasta, steaks, decent sandwiches for lunch, pizza at Miguel's...ah, the benefits of car camping!
Other things of note are that I learned several important skills. I learned how to properly clean up a route (remove all gear) after we're done with it, how to rappel (using a prusek knot), and how to properly set quickdraws while climbing. I lead my first outdoor climb, it was a 5.10a with a really big last move, pretty high up above the last bolt, so a fall from there would have been long. It was also great getting used to climbing outdoors and learning how to read the handholds. A lot of the time, a place that seemed like it might be a good hold ended up being a piece of crap, and all the chalk smeared on it only threw me off more!
In other news, CC is going away for 3 months!!! :-( She's going to do some field work in Washington or Oregon, counting birds in some wildlife reserve or something. There will probably be limited access to phone and/or internet, which really does suck. It's going to be pretty rough! But possibly it will help me finish my masters!
Anyway, stay tuned for photos from Kentucky.
GS
posted by a bike rider in the big smoke at 12:43 p.m.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home