Summits, as I’ve implied before, are hard to find here in Florida.
But starting in October, the holiday season stretches on and up like the long trudge up parts of Kilimanjaro. And, of course, trying to fit work and training in between both hosting and attending the social functions of the season can create a stress level no less intense than the oxygen deficits you feel at over 14,000 feet.
Here in the U.S., at least, it starts with Halloween. Even though the daughters are no longer among the bands of ghosts and goblins marching through our neighborhood in search of treats, for over 20 years now we have shared the evening with the parents of two other children of identical age (and I do mean identical because we met in Lamaze class).
A short three of four weeks after that is the annual trek to California for Thanksgiving – see earlier post about Point Lobos – and trying to cram as much time as we can with family and friends into a barely four day visit. Let’s see, that works out to how many minutes a person?
The Cooking Operation- Making Meringues
The return from California starts the cycle of my work party, the husband’s work party, the book club party, the women’s group party, various and sundry parties, and then one I host to prove that I too can do something other than practice law and climb mountains. This one was particularly challenging since it came on the heels of an unexpectedly extended out of town business trip. Always make sure the day 1 jacket will match the day 2 skirt to create something that looks vaguely different for day 3.
I suppose everyone feels the holidays should culminate in a summit at Christmas or New Year’s – as immense and amazing as that incredible spot at the top of Mt. Elbrus – or perhaps, to use a more accessible image, the fantastic ice castle at the top of the mountain in Disney’s Frozen. But maybe it is really the gentle valleys hiding somewhere amid all the revelry that give the holidays some meaning – the few quiet moments where you can sit for a few minutes, meditate, and watch the sun reflect on the summits that surround you, whether real or metaphorical. Happy holidays, everyone.
Since the cancellation of my 4 pm Saturday Bikram class, my Saturday training has turned into a five mile run with the present goal of picking up speed. The last run was a break through – all five under 12 minutes and mile 3 was 11:01. Not much for you real runners out there but for me – something to be proud of.
But occupying one’s mind is a huge part of running, at least for me. And as I pushed along on this glorious blue sky day in Central Florida – here are some miscellaneous thoughts.
Uber is becoming a huge deal here, with pro and con views circulated in the local paper, facebook and all other sorts of places. I was devoutly glad of Uber last night, however, when daughter number 2, home for the holidays, and her friends all wanted to go downtown at about 11 pm. The husband and I had arrived back from a colleague’s party only to find six or so cars parked in front of our house, together with two large SUVs double parked with two men outside talking on their cell phones, waiting to transport the various and sundry party goers at our house into downtown. But the daughter and friends weren’t driving themselves – and for that I was glad!
And somehow Uber makes me think of Airbnb. It’s really the same concept – rent your spare room, avoid hotel taxes and regulations – and why shouldn’t you? In fact, I look at my own house with its private entrance to the guest suite, and I would have a perfect set up. So why shouldn’t I?
I get the pros and cons and I understand all the arguments about requiring cabs to service poor neighborhoods etc. But aren’t Uber and Airbnb really stemming from the same mentality? The do it yourself, organically home grown business model? (I guess that would be true, except for the fact Uber, at least, is a multi million dollar company.) And at its heart, isn’t that the same drive that’s caused me to plant my own vegetables and herbs and has made the husband brew his own beer?
As residents of the tail end of the baby boom – born in 1961 – it’s interesting to observe some commonalities with the millenials. Don’t they say everything skips a generation? Now I just need to retire so I can finally get my own chicken coop.
Galopagos [http://www.flickr.com/people/59888966@N00 Pete]We’re still musing about whether to add Chimborazo to our Cotopaxi climb this summer.
Last night we went to a combination birthday/retirement party for a dear friend. Among other presents – was an URN. Not an urn for a plant, or to carry water or wine, and it wasn’t even Grecian – rather it was the repository for ashes after the inevitable end. And what made it even more remarkable – it was a USED urn. I did not inquire too deeply of the circumstances that had led to the removal of one set of ashes and the apparent preparation for another occupant.
Tonight we had dinner with another old friend who was singing the praises of the Galopagos Islands. And one of my yoga buddies wore his Galopagos Islands t-shirts to yoga today. What I haven’t mentioned before here is that Chimborazo isn’t our only possible trip extension – Galopagos is there also.
Connection with urn? Back to the only live once phenomenon. On the urn – as John Keats told us – the characters are immortalized in time and art. The husband and I clearly aren’t going to be. Life is now or never. So now we’ve added a third decision point – we KNOW Cotopaxi is in – I have already submitted my application although the husband is dilly dallying with his. But now – no extension, Chimborazo – which would stretch mind, body and soul, or Galopagos? I should be happy to have such first world problems. Thoughts, fellow travelers?
Point Lobos is like a summit turned on its side, lying on the deep blue bed of the Pacific. This Thanksgiving, as almost always, the husband and I made the trek to and from Florida and California on the busiest travel days of the year – Wednesday before Thanksgiving and Sunday after – to meet up with daughters one and two and an assortment of brothers, sisters, cousins and friends in the Monterey area.
One tradition has always been a Thanksgiving Day excursion of some sort. It used to be what we called sand sledding on the large sand dunes that overlooked both highway and ocean near aptly named Sand City. Kids and adults alike would zoom down the steeply angled dunes on pieces of cardboard – usually wiping out somewhere before the bottom, only to clamber back up and try it all over again. Thanksgiving didn’t seem complete without sockfuls of sand that would appear in odd places for several days after.
As the children got bigger and the adults creakier, sand dunes shifted to hikes. We’ve done several at the Garland Ranch. During one of the first, daughter one (and possibly daughter two) and I managed to get separated from the rest of the contingent, and spent an extra couple of hours wandering lost through the chaparral. Finally we saw a rather dressed up family whose outfits clearly showed they weren’t off for a long distance hike and we were able to follow them back to civilization. Another hike – when we were training for Kilimanjaro – was up in the Soberanes Canyon – and by up I mean steep! For some reason I had brought hiking boots, but no hiking appropriate jacket, not realizing how cold it would be. A common mistake when going to California. I ended up wearing my black Michael Kors raincoat for the whole thing. I’m not sure whether I cut a dashing figure or looked like some eccentric character out of a vampire novel.
This year we returned to Point Lobos. Just south of Carmel, near the start of Big Sur, the spectacular coastline between Carmel and Santa Barbara. Trails wander through coastal woods, and lead to cliffs that manage to be both rocky and sandy at the same time. Cypress trees are silhouetted against an open skyline, and out in the ocean rocks form classic arches that create pathways for the waves to pool and then crash. Along the route, numerous white sand beaches nestle between the cliffs. They are only reachable by rickety wooden stairs that wash out in every storm of any significance.
These hikes aren’t really for training and they aren’t even really to see or experience anything new. What makes them special is our family and friends, many of whom we only see once a year. We’ve been to these spots together any number of times. But as each year passes, the lens I view them through changes. The daughters launched into their twenties; the nieces with babies and boyfriends. Yet despite the ever growing cascade of years — the pelicans are still in flight; the sun glints off the water; the flat silver half dollar of the ocean is tossed by the roar of the waves. Still a peak experience, of sorts.
As an English major and daughter of two now retired English professors, I was raised in a house filled with thousands of books. We didn’t just have one copy of a book – we would have triplicate, because, I suppose, you can never have too much of a good thing.
But reading has always powered my imagination – and imagination is probably behind my starting this whole mountain climbing thing in the first place. Well, to be more precise, it was a 1991 movie called K2 that I saw on TV. In fact checking for this post, I discovered it was largely panned by the critics, but I still remember the drama of preparation (one of the climbers was a lawyer) and the critical moments on the mountain where one climber had to make the decision to leave his injured companion behind. The husband found the film absolutely appalling. But for some reason, the adrenalin junkie in me found the battle of man versus the elements completely fascinating.
A good book about the mountains – or any adventure travel – brings you that one step closer to making the summit your own reality. Lots of books have given me that little last push up that extra flight of stairs. Here are some of my favorites and I’d like to know yours – I’m currently perfecting my Kindle reading technique for stair climbing.
The Seven Summits by Frank Wells and Dick Bass. This may be where it truly started. A work colleague of mine lent me this book back in the 1990s, and, true confessions, I never returned it. It’s the tale of the original two who climbed the seven summits in one year, 1983, the year I graduated from university. Easy reading and puts the mountains within reach.
Paths of Glory by Jeffrey Archer. The story of George Mallory’s fateful trip to Everest, starting with his days climbing church steeples. The mystery remains – did he or did he not summit?
Mark Horrell’s travel diaries – these are available very inexpensively in Ebook format. He seems to have climbed everything and his very detailed accounts of mountains ranging from Cotopaxi to Elbrus are quite reassuring to a novice climber.
Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer. Need I say more.
And, to finish up, The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean. Ok, it’s not about summits but it is about swamps., Possibly the most beautiful prose ever written about the adventure of hiking through the wild Florida of the Fakahatchee swamp and the search for rare orchids. Inspirational for swamp dwellers who want to see more than the concrete of Florida development.
As I sit here on a weekend, waiting for the plumber to take his interminable time to arrive (three hours late, thus far), we have some decision-making to do. As hoped, the work schedule cleared up, freeing the way to commit to some June 2015 dates for our next mountain climbing endeavor. And I’ve already contacted the guide company that successfully led us up Elbrus, so that’s done.
But here’s where the itch of mountain climbing – or you could say hubris – sets in. It turns out for an additional four days and a few more dollars, we not only could climb Cotopaxi, but also climb Chimborazo – the highest mountain in Ecuador and one that reaches my long dreamed of goal of a 20,000 foot mountain. Well, long dreamed of if you count 2011 as a long time ago, since that’s when all this started. This would mean acclimatization hikes up Guagua Pichincha and Illiniza Norte, followed by Cotopaxi at 19,348 feet and three days, later – Chimborazo. At 20,564 feet, Chimborazo is harder than Cotopaxi. It’s one degree south of the equator, and because of the bulge of the earth, is the farthest point away from the earth’s core and the closest point to the sun. Hubris is the right word. Think Icarus.
I hadn’t really considered doing the extension. But then yesterday, in the midst of multiple levels of work related issues and general lawyerly stresses – and perhaps in reaction thereto (what a good, lawyerly phrase) – I suddenly found myself saying, “hell, yes.” Not out loud. But a lawyerly phrase, nonetheless.
If not now, then when? I’ll be 54 by next June. There’s no doubt that if we make this commitment it will require the highest level of training either the husband or I have tried to achieve. Sometimes mountains – and summits of all sorts – whether at work or at play – throw the gauntlet down before you and just ask to be climbed, and climbed hard. But I still think I better have a serious talk with the guide company.
Mountains do not rise up from the earth like isosceles triangles. And most things in life don’t have that perfect equilibrium either. Like this week – everything just a little off.
It started when I unpacked a gigantic box containing a keyboard that had belonged to an uncle and now had wended its way to Central Florida. In reaching down into the thousands of styrofoam peanuts that surrounded said keyboard in order to ensure we had located all its bits and pieces, the husband pulled out a carefully wrapped plastic package. I cut it open, expecting a plug or some similar piece of equipment, only to find – a string of pearls! A visit to the jeweler the next day confirmed they weren’t real, but now I still face the task of contacting UPS to see if they there is any report of missing pearls in peanuts.
That set the tone for the rest of the week.
One of our elderly Westies continues to be profoundly deaf and is proving not very capable of learning sign language. His brother has decided he can only eat dry dog food if scattered on the floor outside of his bowl. And the ancient cat continues to believe he is a mountain lion and to attack dogs.
My dearly beloved ten year old car blew the same fuse for the second time in six weeks. Who knew the same fuse that controls the radio controls the ignition. But combined with a very leaky convertible top, the prospect of having to change fuses on the side of the interstate while driving to an out of town meeting on Monday was enough to cause us to finally buy a new car.
At least events of tomorrow should determine my schedule sufficiently that we can actually book our Cotopaxi trip. At yoga last Wednesday night the moon was full but for a slice off one side, teetering against the black sky. I’m hoping that this next week – with the next summit firmly chosen and set – restores equipoise.
For several years I have had a semi-inflexible yoga schedule. What I call “regular” yoga on Wednesday nights and Sunday afternoons, with some cardio thrown in on the step mill or treadmill, accompanied by Bikram on Saturday afternoons. But all things change, and my long beloved 4 pm Bikram class is, at least for now, no longer. What’s a girl to do?
True, I could go to a 10 am class, which I have occasionally done, but I find my balance is not nearly as good in the morning. Somehow I need the day to be underway before I have the necessary focus.
So, without making any commitments one way or the other to what my new Saturday routine will be, yesterday morning I ventured off to a high end running shoe store. It’s one of those places where customers are called guests, and you’re assigned a salesperson (although I’m sure they call them something else) as soon as you walk in. The process starts with extensive foot measurements, followed by a video of you running along the sidewalk in front of the store so they can frame by frame analyze how your foot strikes.
At the end, I was the proud owner of a remarkably expensive pair of Asics, together with super feet insoles. But I don’t mind spending money on those things – the cost of shin splints or otherwise wrecking your feet, legs, or back is way too great when you have mountains to climb.
And it turned out to be worth it. Fall finally fell in Central Florida and my new shoes and I went for a 4 1/4 mile run around the lake we live on. The difference between running in 90 and 65 degrees should have been self-evident, but I was still surprised by it. There was a decent breeze that was behind my back for a bit, not a cloud to be seen, and the pink seed casings of the tabebouia trees served as a very acceptable substitute for fall leaves.
Ok, so my left hip now hurts and maybe I really shouldn’t have used my new insoles for the first time on a four mile run against instructions, but whatever. Letting go of one training routine and opening up some new possibilities – I think that’s the flexibility it’s going to take to get up all 19,500 feet of Cotopaxi.
Audubon Park with Loyola University in the background
The name of this blog isn’t FromSwamptoSummit for nothing. Occasionally, it’s important to come down from the summit or to allow yourself to be side tracked from the attempt to reach it, and enjoy a good wallow in a swamp. And what better place to wallow than New Orleans!
The husband and I have a long history with this city. When we got married in the spring of 1986, we planned to use the frequent flyer points I had garnered over a year of “fly outs” – as we then called the interview trips paid for by law firms to lure prospective summer associates – for our honeymoon. The only problem – all my points were with the now defunct New York Air. Besides Boston and New York, where we respectively resided, New York Air flew only to Detroit and New Orleans. The choice was not difficult.
Hotel Villa Convento – not sure where the ghostly light came from. Perhaps something to do with the House of the Rising Sun?
Back in 1986, we stayed at the Hotel Villa Convento on Ursalines Street. In those pre Internet days we found it through a budget travel guide that I am sure we consulted at a bookstore without ever purchasing. The small family owned hotel has the dubious distinction of being across the street from a convent and is supposedly also the original house of sin made famous in the song, House of the Rising Sun. It had a certain moldy, faded glory, and we loved it. We’ve been back numerous times, including visits with children, parents and friends.
This trip – to visit daughter #2 – was assisted by the budget hotel vendor, HotWire, and the winner of this particular lottery was the Clarion Grand Boutique Hotel on St.Charles Street, the grand dame of all of New Orleans’ many boulevards. We knew we wanted to stay on St. Charles and this location is just about a mile above the Central Business District on the way uptown. We feared things might be off to an odd start when we checked in only to find a completely unknown credit card number associated with our reservation, together with a San Francisco address. After some detective work (oh, that legal training), we realized the address was that of HotWire itself – and who knows what the credit card was but we checked in anyway.
The daughter had made dinner reservations for us and several of her housemates at Martinique, a nice restaurant off Magazine Street with a pretty garden room where we were seated. The menu was most notable for its desserts – in particular, chocolate rye cake with beet chutney. I was somewhat surprised when the husband – who hates beets – said he’d try a bite. He was equally surprised when what he thought was a raspberry topping turned out to be beets.
The food extravaganza continued on Saturday. At least we started the day with a four mile walk from the hotel up St. Charles Street to the daughter’s house on the far side of Tulane – one of our favorite walks anywhere. Most cities have only a narrow strip of historic homes – New Orleans has blocks and blocks that run deep. The houses are often very close together, yet are huge. Many of them appear to still be single family residences. They are grand, with ornate columns and details, small front yards, and the dark, large front doors suggest a secret world closed off to all but those whose families hail from New Orleans’ early days.
We picked up sandwiches at the St. James Cheese Company, a small cafe selling gourmet – what else – cheese, and had a picnic lunch at Audubon Park, New Orleans’ answer to New York’s Central Park. We were barely off St. Charles Street, but our lunch companions were multiple types of ducks and turtles lazing in the sun.
An island of turtles – look closely….
Drove down to the French Quarter and poked around for a little bit. Bourbon Street as tacky as always, but the side streets as charming as I remember. Lots of Halloween ghouls peeking over the balconies, contemplating the various spooky characters below.
Zoom in for the Halloween hosts –
Dinner at GW Fin’s. I was amused to see that New Bedford sea scallops from Massachusetts were on the menu, together with gulf coast pompano. The daughter and husband both had “scalibit” – it’s a piece of halibut with scallops baked into the top of the fish and tastes as decadent as it sounds.
A trip to New Orleans wouldn’t be complete without a trip to the Sazarac Bar at the Roosevelt Hotel. And following that a visit to the Marigny to hear music on Frenchmen Street. But who knew that there were two such streets in New Orleans – or one street that is disconnected in the middle….I knew something was wrong on our Google maps when we found ourselves on the interstate, ending up at a Frenchmen Street that dead ended into the city bus parking lot! All I can say is the white SUV in front of us had apparently made the same mistake since it made the same u-turn and trip back to the city.
Once we finally got to the right place we listened to some retro sounding jazz at the Apple Barrel and finished with blues by the Smokey Grenwell Band at Club Bamboula’s.
A final travel note – we ended our stay with a leisurely breakfast at Coulis and a drive through the Fly – also called Avenger Park. It’s the riverside part of Audubon Park where you can see the tugs pushing long lines of barges down the Mississippi. It’s a favorite hangout for the daughter.
And it was particularly leisurely because we thought our flight left at 2 pm. We got to the airport early – and fortunately so, because it turned out the 2 pm on my calendar was eastern time – and the plane was leaving at 1 pm Central! But New Orleans gave us that one extra hour to enjoy without worry – just another one of the gifts of slow time and ease that the city offers. We all need to spend more time in the swamp.
I’m still processing our Mount Washington hike. And I am increasingly struck by how little I actually want to go “real” rock climbing, which our present idea for a next adventure – The Grand Teton – seems to offer in abundance. I’m currently reading To the Last Breath – A Memoir of Going to Extremes by Francis Slakey. It starts off with him and a climbing partner sleeping on a ledge on the face of El Capitan in Yosemite – roped, of course – only to have the webbing that held their “cot” fray and plummet out from under them some 2000 feet down. Not for me.
But in contrast, somehow the idea of a 14 hour night into day slogging up and down a glacier on a volcanic mountain – even with the incumbent risk of avalanche, crevasses, and a slip that could turn into a never-ending tumble down – doesn’t read the same way to me. I’m not sure I can articulate why a sheer granite wall feels so different than an expanse of deep white, but it does. Perhaps the glacier seems something that simple determination can conquer; the other requires more innate physical ability and guts.
Whatever the case, all I can say is that narrowing our focus to a trip in June or July of 2015 to Cotopaxi, the second highest mountain in Ecuador, with acclimatization hikes up Guagua Pichincha (15,696 feet) and Illiniza Norte (16,818 feet), is reinvigorating my training. Today, having narrowly managed to dodge the paper avalanche currently threatened by thousands of documents on my desk, I climbed stairs for over an hour – seven times up and down my building. Cotopaxi will be at least as hard as Elbrus, and there will be a sufficient amount of scrambling, especially, I think, on Illiniza Norte, to satisfy any inchoate desire to climb up a pile of rocks.
Cotopaxi is 19,348 feet, 7 feet higher than Kilimanjaro and about 800 feet higher than Elbrus. Every time I have climbed a mountain I have always felt if I had a do-over I’d do it better the next time. But you don’t go backwards to a mountain. You just find a new one.
![Galopogos [http://www.flickr.com/people/59888966@N00 Pete]](https://fromswamptosummit.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/image3.jpg)
FromSwamptoSummit 