hiking

And Work Gets In the Way….That 20,000 Foot Goal

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Training – 25 pound pack – fire staircase at work at lunch. I own that staircase.

Well, our plane tickets are bought. Our hike of five days along the Whisky Trail in the Scottish Highlands is booked – basically meaning we have pre-made reservations at BnBs for various small villages along the Speyside Way. Daughters have been duly informed that the last day’s hike is 17 miles – oops, sorry, only told oldest daughter that fact. If the other one reads this blog she now knows it.

It’s a bit odd, since I don’t feel the same necessity of super duper training we’ve needed on some of our other mountain adventures. But since we’re still planning on some more high altitude peaks out there, I can’t just sit back on my laurels (however miniscule they are anyway). But without a very high mountain peering down at me, and with the distractions of work ever present, it’s harder and harder to feel the pressure to train. It was over 80 degrees today – the first day of spring – and when I ran back him from yoga at the Y, it felt more like a slog.

The title for this post was work gets in the way. Perhaps that’s a cop out. I like to believe that if I didn’t have to get up tomorrow and be a fully functioning plus individual, my day would be open to write, draw, remodel rooms of my house, recycle more and work on my vegetable garden. Is that really what would happen? Would I actually just putter around in pajamas and wrestle my Westie to be the first to look at the junk mail pushed through the the mail slot? Somewhere and somehow I still need to know that 20,000 foot goal is there. When it’s in the mid-80s and hot – that’s the only thing that keeps you running the extra mile.

A New York Minute – in Orlando

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Downtown Orlando

So the leaping and springing forward of the last two weeks took their toll, and left me unable to complete the post I’d planned yesterday. Blame it on that extra day and one less hour. Funny how the extra day didn’t compensate for the one less hour.

This week we’re taking a brief detour from treks and summits to explore urban hiking combined with public transportation in downtown Orlando – a city not renowned for its pedestrian friendly nature.

Being fortunate enough to to live a mere 2 1/2 miles from work, walking is always a option for me. And on Friday, as is frequently my wont, I went ahead and took the 45 minute stroll into the office. See Urban Hiking in Orlando – Art in Odd Places. (There’s actually another post somewhere in this blog about urban hiking that I couldn’t even find – the risks of writing almost every week.)

But this time I’d planned a transportation challenge for the way back. Yes, I could have taken Sunrail – our new uber light rail that goes from my office to Florida Hospital, just a 20 minute walk from my house.

Or I could take the Lymmo.

I still remember a client looking at me aghast when I said I would take a lymmo to the courthouse.

Here in Orlando the lymmo is our free circulating bus.  Several routes have just been added, one of which goes almost to the edge of the lake I live by. So at just past 6 on Friday I ventured out, dodging the Orlando City soccer fans who were all taking express lymmo buses to the soccer stadium, to wait for about 8 minutes for my bus up to the courthouse, the site to change for bus number 2. The bus on the first leg of my journey was fairly crowded. Most prominent was a young woman with a toddler carrying a bag smelling decidedly of seafood. The woman carried the bag,  not the toddler. After she and said toddler (in stroller) plopped themselved down she pulled out a crab leg from her plastic bag. “No eating on the bus,” boomed the driver. Back went the crab leg. She unstrapped said toddler from the stroller and hoisted her up onto her lap, swishing away the milky stains from said toddler’s face, neck and arms. The smell of seafood started to dissipate.

By the time we reached the courthouse, the location to pick up bus number 2, pretty much everyone was off. One poor soul was still trying to figure out how to get to the soccer game. That left me and two others. As I studied my map for the next leg of my journey, up to the senior center in Marks Street, which would leave me a more 20 minutes walk from my house, one of my fellow travelers asked me if I needed help.

I love traveling incognito. At this point I was just one of the weary trying to get home on free transportation – little resemblance to the lawyer I spend my days disguised as.

I explained where I was headed and she told me to make sure to watch for the bus swinging around the corner, because that would be the one I needed.  The other gentlemen on the bus was quite talkative – he was headed up to Park Lake to meet friends, carrying a plastic bag filled with what appeared to a liquid and potato chip picnic. We all commiserated on the sad state of Orlando’s roads, wrought by the Ultimate I4 construction project, and enjoyed one of those moments of kinship that crosses all racial, economic and educational bounds.

I disembarked in front of the Senior Center, the only passenger left before the bus made its next loop back to the courthouse. The driver had another two or three hours to go. The already warm evening made a little warmer by the warmth generated by the shared community of free bus riders. Like one of those fleeting moments in New York – when people on the subway all make eye contact.  Not always clear why – just a moment everyone’s worlds and perceptions collide.

Looking Backward, Leaping Ahead – Travel Planning

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Where it all began – Summit of Kilimanjaro, July 2011

I couldn’t miss at least one allusion in the title to that rarest of days last week – leap day! One does wonder if anything that happens on that day really counts – or perhaps all the events of leap day fall into some alternate universe that contains only four days each year, or that takes four years to create a year….but enough of such ruminations.

It’s time for a brief retrospective and for a glimpse into future trips. It will be five years ago July that J and I summited Mt. Kilimanjaro – an experience that, as cliched as it sounds, changed our lives forever. Call it mountain fever – or as a friend puts it – mountain head, we couldn’t wait to reach another summit. That trip led to Mt. Hood, the Grand Canyon, the Inca Trail, Mauna Kea, Mt. Elbrus, Mount Washington, the Ecuador volcanoes including Cotopaxi, Pico de Orizaba, and even the little known Puzzle Mountain in Maine.

And a lot of these trips remain to be written about, especially Kilimanjaro. This blog was born when we decided to go to Russia to climb Mt. Elbrus in 2014 and I thought it would be a convenient way to update friends and family. Little did I know that two years later I’d still be blogging.

So what’s on the horizon, both near and far? Well, in the short term, we have a visit to the swamp coming up in about three weeks – that is, a weekend in New Orleans. It’s only one of my favorite places of all time, and of course is home to daughter S (who has wholly rebelled against being referred to as daughter #2, Dr. Seuss allusions notwithstanding). And we follow that with a trip to Boston, more specifically Cambridge and Somerville, where daughter A and a 30th year law school reunion await. Ironically, we were preparing to climb Kilimanjaro when we attended the last reunion and I still remember our visit to Eastern Mountain Sports.

The mid horizon reveals the Whisky Trail in the Scottish Highlands, and there will be much more to come on that. We’ll see if I develop a taste for scotch as part of the training for that hike. It may not be a “summit” per se, but the last day is an ambitious 17 miles. And that will be followed by a week in Scarborough.

As for the distant future – I think there are still more mountains in me. Perhaps another attempt in the Cascades – Rainier may have my name on it.

Whither Next? The Whisky Trail?

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Malcolm, our 15 year old West Highland white terrier, showed up at just the right time. He’s older than the scotch.

I’m finding it increasingly hard to keep up my training regime without the threat of a large mountain looming over me. And even though it looks as though this summer’s adventure is going to be more of the hill and dale variety, it’s getting imperative to make it definite so I at least have the goal of making sure I’m ready for several days of intense hiking. I’m also beginning to think that maybe an intensive course in single malt scotches is needed.

So far the logistics of the trip are presenting some of their own summits. Husband J has become enamored with the idea of hiking the Speyside Way in the Scottish Highlands, also known as the Whisky Trail. I pointed out to him that I am not a scotch lover (I like my Irish whisky better), but he contends  that four or five days of hiking along a beautiful river with stops at distilleries along the way will change my mind. And daughters A and S and respective boyfriends, who are to accompany us on this trip, seem to feel a whisky trail in Scotland is eminently appropriate for young Millenials. Even our travel with friends friends, M and S, are interested so we may form quite a merry band of pilgrims.

But that’s just one aspect of the trip. It will start with J and me flying with my parents from Orlando to Manchester, where they will visit with friends while the remainder of the group goes off on the whisky pilgrimage. Then the idea is to rent a house, perhaps AirBnB, in Scarborough or somewhere else on the North Yorkshire coast for a week before returning to Florida. I grew up spending time either on the North Yorkshire or North Carolina coast (rather a stark contrast), so it’s going to be a throwback for me. We last took the girls to the North Yorkshire coast in 2000.

So, the plans now entail planes, trains and automobiles and everything else along the way.  We have to obtain plane tickets, figure out multiple modes of transporting ourselves from Manchester to the highlands (some combination of train and bus and I’m just hoping we can avoid hitch hiking), find a vacation rental house for one specific week that can accommodate at least 8 people, rent a car, and identify a tour company that will provide 6 or 8 people with guest house reservations and luggage transport as we toddle along between distilleries.

I think it may be easier to attempt an 18,000 foot mountain.

Reflections on the Swamp – An Orlando Loop

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City Reflections

The swamp was especially wet this week as a very beautiful morning morphed into a grey day of drizzle, thanks to El Niño. Yes, this post is a detour from adventures in Mexico, the conclusion of which will be forthcoming. A few twists are always needed here and there.

Orlando’s Dinky Line Urban Trail is part of my running routine. But I’d always wondered about the part of the trail that on the map consisted mostly of orange dots, which is apparently code for sidewalk as opposed to trail. In any event, the cool weather proved tempting and instead of a run followed by Bikram, husband J and I found ourselves on what turned out to be an 11 mile loop to and around Orlando’s in-the-process-of-being-renovated and turned into something else entirely Fashion Square Mall.

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We started off accompanied by one of Lake Ivanhoe’s many resident and, to me, unidentifiable water birds. He looked a lot more enthusiastic about the drizzle than we were.  Shortly after, still on the part of the trail I knew, we passed what I am convinced is a haunted radio station. It’s been empty since we’ve lived here, yet it’s right next to a popular hotel. Just one of those urban ruins. A few other urban ruins in our journey – an abandoned sushi restaurant and a bank that looked as though it had never recovered from a heist.

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Finally we reach d the orange dot part of the trail and we were off! First up was a tour of in-fill development in an area called Colonialtown.  Small townhouses and fourplexes, built in the style of the original small houses.  Surprisingly attractive, even in the rain that started to fall more heavily.

To my surprise, we then discovered that what I had always thought was the beginning of the Cady Way Trail wasn’t. The trail head is actually located at Lake Druid Park – a lake and a park I’d never heard of despite 25 plus years in Orlando. Shortly after, we finally reached the mall and it was time for a lunch break at Noodle Co. – a first for us. At least it rained hardest while we were inside.

The Executive Airport is across the street from the mall, and after some difficulty with urban route finding, we got ourselves back on the orange dots. Next to the airport is a party supply store selling themed party goods for any type of celebration you could imagine. Who knew there were so many types of princess tiaras. Not to mention sizes and shapes of plastic trays or colors of napkins. And there was even a room filled with nothing but janitorial supplies.

A little bit of FaceTime with daughter S entertained us for the next mile or so. Nothing like getting to watch a New Orleans Mardi Gras parade in real time. That was followed up by the Orlando Chili Cook Off – if we’d known we wouldn’t have had lunch!

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After passing the landmark Colonial Lanes Bowling alley – what could be better than cocktails and bowling – we finally made our way back toward downtown and along what I can only describe as Memory Lane. There was the girls’ daycare center. And the orthodontist’s office, where I spent many an hour in the waiting room.

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Mile 11 of our loop brought us back to Lake Ivanhoe. We bookended our hike with another bird – a serious grey heron who looked as though he might charge us admission for passage around the lake.

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There was no snow, no ice, and no altitude. But there were a lot of things and places I’d never noticed before in the few miles right around my house – and that’s an exploration in itself.

 

 

Where We Are Going Next – Pico de Orizaba, Veracruz, Mexico

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Photo – http://www.sil.org/~tuggyd/Pix – Pico de Orizaba

Over the last few months I’ve been publishing posts that refer to Pico de Orizaba, our next climbing destination, as though it’s a location at the forefront of everyone’s personal geography. That certainly can’t be the case – this particular mountain wasn’t close to the forefront of my mind until we started to try to find a big mountain that could be climbed in winter and in under seven days. When you live in Florida, the choices are limited.

So after looking at our options, we settled on the Orizaba Express trip, again through Mountain  Madness, the company that has successfully and safely led us up Mt. Elbrus in Russia and Cotopaxi, Illiniza Norte and Cayambe in Ecuador.

Pico de Orizaba is a strato volcano 120 miles outside of Mexico City, on the border of Veracruz and Puebla, by the town of Orizaba.  According to Wikipedia, fount of all knowledge, it has gone by a number of names. Non-Nahuatl speakers in the area call it Istaktepetl or “White Mountain.” During  the Pre-Columbian Era it was referred to as Poyautécatl, which means “the ground that reaches the clouds.”

My favorite of its names is  Citlaltépetlas, which is what it was called in the Náhuatl language when the Spanish arrived in this part of the world, and means “Star Mountain.”

During the colonial era, the mountain was known by the rather boring appellation, Cerro de San Andrés, due to the nearby settlement of San Andrés Chalchicomula at its base.

It is the third highest mountain in North America (behind Denali and Mt.  Logan), one of the volcanic Seven Summits, and the second most prominent volcano in the world, after Kilimanjaro. Pico de Orizaba measures 18,491 feet high, a statistic I find particularly notable because one of our teammates on Mt. Elbrus was part of the group that measured the mountain using GPS some years ago.

After arriving on AeroMexico, according to our trip itinerary, we will start acclimatizing in Mexico City, around 7,341 feet. From there we journey to the pyramids of Teotihuacan, and the next day climb Malinche, 14,640 feet. After that we travel to Tlachichuca, and – somewhat ominously – “transfer to four wheel drive” for the trip to the hut at Piedra Grande (13,972′). Our final acclimatization hike is to the toe of the Jamapa glacier at about 16,000′ and back down to the hut.  Summit day involves elevation gain of about 4,500′ – which is a lot, and may be one of the biggest elevation gains we will have done in one day. To reach the summit, you traverse a rocky section named after one of my favorite words, the Labyrinth. The section right below the caldera looks really quite steep – definitely an area for ice axes. If it’s anything like Cotopaxi, I anticipate collapsing at the top – assuming the gods bless us with good weather and the mountain lets us summit.

We’ll have a night in Tlachichuca and one final night in Mexico City – and then it will be back to Orlando on an airline I had never even heard of until yesterday, Volaris. I realized one of the reasons it’s so cheap is that you have to pay to select seats – but they let you have a free checked bag!

I’ve been looking for free images of the Labyrinth, but couldn’t locate any. Perhaps a testament to the comparative obscurity of this mountain.  But I love that it’s a mountain of many names. As I said above, and as many a mountain guide has told me – you don’t climb a mountain; it lets you climb it. And I hope that Pico de Orizaba will look favorably on us in just a few weeks.

 

My First Hike, Yorkshire, England, circa late 1960s/early 1970s

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With my grandparents and brother, on the way to Greasborough, South Yorkshire, circa late 1960s

This is a difficult post to write because it needs be just right. How do you capture your first hike – at least, the one that you remember? Something there planted a seed. And somehow that has ultimately led me to Cotopaxi, Ecuador, to Kilimanjaro, to Puzzle Mountain, Maine.

It started with the bridle path from Rawmarsh to Greasborough, both in South Yorkshire. My mother is English and my father is from Alabama (don’t even ask), and as they were both English professors, we had the luxury of spending weeks at a time in England during the summers. More specifically, in South Yorkshire, where my mother’s family is from.  Another time I’ll write about the coast and the moors. This is about an old fashioned trail, in the “industrial” north, replete with stiles.

In the late 1960s, my grandparents moved to very nice council housing, outside of their original home on Clay Pit Lane, yes, that’s a real address, in a small town called Rawmarsh, outside of Rotherham, in South Yorkshire. D. H. Lawrence, coal mining, and all that. My parents were married at the Rawmarsh parish church, St. Mary’s, and that’s where I was christened.  There were any number of small villages on the outskirts of Rawmarsh – from Parkgate (home of antique shops and the tripe shop) to Upper Haugh (a collection of rundown houses, at least rundown at that time, ten or so of which made up a village for mailing purposes). Perhaps now they are all rehabbed and are expensive weekend homes for IT people working in Sheffield.

The bridle path to Greasborough, a small village by a lake, was a special walk that entailed a picnic basket, a thermos filled with tea, and sandwiches. As you can see from the photo at the top, my grandmother did it all with stockings and a skirt. And it appears I was wearing a dress! One summer my parents left my brother and me in Yorkshire with our grandparents while they attended the very first Bloomsday conference in Dublin at which my father was presenting a paper on Joyce. (This is the sort of childhood memory you have when you’re the daughter of two English professors.) I’m pretty sure the hike to Greasborough is one of the activities that my poor grandparents used to try to entertain their excruciatingly Amerrican grandchildren.

Just at the head of the trail was an old shop that in America we’d call a general store. I remember my brother and me buying candies (sweets) for the walk from our allowances (pocket money).

The bridle path itself was old cobbled bricks, running through forests and between fields. Where one field bordered another you’d clamber over a wooden stile. See photo below. As I understood it, the stiles were meant to keep livestock from crossing unwanted into their neighbors’ fields. I’d never seen a stile in North Carolina, where I lived when I wasn’t in England.

My Grandmother and me
My Grandmother and me
On the left side of the bridle path was a gully filled with beds and beds of bluebells. I so wish I had photos of them because I’ve never seen them since – at least not like that. Six inch stems with rich indigo bells of flowers cascading down. On the right of the bridle path, if you ventured off, was the old head of a mine. This had been a working world, where many spent the sunlit days hundreds of feet down mining the coal that was fueling the mid twentieth century economy. The hole into the ground looked like an entrance into some magical world to my brother and me. We just knew it was a spot we were told never to go – we could fall down and never come out. Every time we passed the hollow that housed the mine head, we always veered off to have a look.

As you continued on, you eventually reached a lake, and I believe a dam of some sort, and on into the village of Greasborough. If memory serves, we’d stop at that point and get an ice cream or something for the walk back.

In 1985 or so, when I returned with my boyfriend – ultimately to be husband – I think after we hiked the few miles to Greasborough, we caught a bus back to Rawmarsh. He was struck by the public bathroom by the bus stop in Greasborough – a stone enclosure on the side of the road, the facilities of which involved nothing more than a gutter with water flowing through it.

I haven’t been to this spot for at least 30 years. And I’m pretty sure that the last time I went, you could already see housing developments over the bluebell beds, and I’m sure the old mine head had been cordoned off and made safe from incursions of eleven year olds.

But the magic of that old bridle path – and the people who walked it all those years ago – still resonates like some chord left reverberating. And when I climb mountains, or hike in the woods, that’s the fairy magic I’m returning to.

West Orange Trail Redux

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We are two months out from Pico de Orizaba, so it’s time for…the 20 mile hike on the West Orange Trail!

For those of you who’ve read this blog before, you know this isn’t the first time we’ve embarked on this somewhat odd urban hike through the wilds of Orlando’s suburbs. But this time we decided to start from the Apopka end and finish at the Killarney Station, just five miles beyond Winter Garden. (Sorry, Apopka – you just don’t compete with Winter Garden’s breweries and brasseries.)

Themes of the day were butterflies, bugs, and bruises. The butterflies you’ll see in the photos below. The bugs are not pictured, but it turns out that every beautifully shaded bench is equally viewed as such by Florida’s massive mosquitos. And the bruises are from the last two miles where I decided my boots were laced too loosely, tied them up tightly – and hugely over compensated.

So here’s the blow by blow –

It’s 6:55 a.m. We violated all of our vows to prepare sensibly by not going to sleep early enough.  Instead we followed dinner with our friends M and S (see “travel with friends – the Iceland series” https://fromswamptosummit.com/2015/03/15/iceland-part-1-a-day-in-reykjavik/) with a visit to an Irish pub, Fiddlers Green, to hear The Windbreakers. We’ve been listening to this Irish music duo since all of our kids were knee high to a grasshopper. But it wasn’t conducive to an early morning rising.

Nonetheless, by 8:15 or so we contacted Uber to take us up to the trailhead. It was way too early to get any of our nearest and dearest to drive 30 minutes on a Saturday morning. I’m sure I typed in the right address on the Uber app – to Park Avenue in Apopka – but somehow our driver thought he’d picked up a trip to Park Avenue in Hollywood, Florida. Now that would have been a worthy affair.

Mile 2 – after exiting our Uber ride (surely no more stylish way to arrive), by the Apopka Middle School, we suddenly found ourselves in a throng of a couple hundred middle school students, some with parents, walking a walk to raise money for either breast cancer or cystic fibrosis. Whatever the worthy cause, I’m embarrassed to say we walked as fast as possible to get ourselves out of the throng.

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Here are  the snippets from my contemporaneously recorded notes.

Scraps of middle school conversation. “She blew up in the middle of class” (I really wanted to know how that happened). Very few boyfriend/girlfriends hand holding. I’m sure there was more of that in my day in the ’70s.

Downtown Apopka. The Catfish Place restaurant amidst a sea of fast food establishments.  Dunkin Donuts taken to an art form.  Right next to the BBQ place. Turns out BBQ was a theme for the day.

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Mile 3.  Shaded woods, winding trail, lots of churches. As before, I’m baffled by St. Elizabeth, Church of God by Faith next to the Freedom Missionary church.  More BBQ smokers smoking away by modest and well kept homes. Moving on – we pass what must be a borrow pit for the interstate construction project.

Mile 4. Two people pass us, riding what look like elliptical bikes. Never seen them before. All of a sudden I realize my iPhone email isn’t working and it wipes out and then re-downloads my messages since August. Not a big deal – except I’m already fielding work calls on this Saturday morning.

The remnants of Florida’s fern industry – right next to Nelson’s Florida roses and Hippy’s Junk Auto Parts. That’s really the name.

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At Mile 5 we take a break – where we encounter the first of the mosquito swarms.  I also inadvertently hit my Fitbit watch face and it starts counting miles all over again on the GPS. For the remainder of the hike, I’m adding 5.23 miles to what the current  mileage shows. That’s a challenge to your math after about six hours or so.

Mile 6. We’ve made our way to the Buddhist temple,which was such a surprise the first time around.
A service is going on. I could hear voices but  couldn’t make out any words. Through the open door at the back I could see the monks in their yellow robes.

Immediately after we pass a home decorated with great concrete statues – next to one of several town homes abutting the trail where birthday celebrations seemed to have started hard and early. “Go Jerry” – whoever you are.

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Mile  7.  We’re back on a sidewalk by a main road. Housing complex to our  left, clear cutting and a seemingly abandoned housing development on our right. It’s really hot. We’ll see a long stretch of unshaded asphalt ahead of us and just think – go for it.

Mile 8.  Off the streets again onto a trail.  But it’s a stereotypical Florida image. A golf course on the left, a memorial garden on the right, and a filled in swimming pool by some outbuildings. Golf, then die?

Mile 9. We stop for lunch under an overpass.  There are golf courses on either side, but there are no bugs because there are no trees. And we forgot the bug spray anyway. All of a sudden, we realize what we had thought were some sort of exotic trash cans are really water coolers. Who knew.

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Mile 10.  Tiger swallowtail butterflies; beautiful light brown and lavender moths, Florida’s version of monarchs.. Caterpillars. I spend a lot of time thinking about shape shifters.

Mile 11. Time for blister and foot repair. Get a call from daughter #2. She sounds good. Way away from golf courses now and back into that odd cacophony of semi rural and suburbs. There’s an old warehouse on the right, and a band practicing.

Mile 12. We see a huge tortoise.  We pass Ocoee High School. There’s an ag program, and the three cows and donkey make  lot of noises as we pass. Reach another rest stop – the “Chapin station.” Lots more housing developments. A bathroom break. I see a flame bush over the top of the white vinyl fence lining the trail.

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Mile 13. I’m getting tired.  After some beautiful wooded and agricultural sections, we pass a truck storage spot. Guys are hanging out by their big flatbeds. A smoker is going. Looks like a good time on a Saturday afternoon if you have to hang out by your work truck.

There are old abandoned orange groves and a few packing buildings. There’s a concrete plant.   Seven  more miles to go and my discipline of a sentence or two each mile breaks down. Here’s what we saw – in retrospect – moving into Winter Garden. An absolutely perfect small town restoration, with a lively downtown and lots of people, enjoying a November Saturday. The last five miles are a park-like trail from Winter Garden to the Killarney Station with oh so eco friendly housing developments – but they are still housing developments. The odd farm opposite on the other side of the trail houses zebras and ostriches. There’s a parking lot for mega party buses. And a covered bridge going over the interstate that we were sure was swaying beneath our feet. Or that could just have been the fact it was mile 19. Nothing beats Florida for iconoclasm. Suburbs. Spanish moss. Greenness that just doesn’t quit. Even the golf courses can’t eradicate it. And peering down at it all this great blue flat sky.

After we reached Killarney Station and met up with friends A and T – and enjoyed beer and pizza at Winter Garden’s Crooked Can craft brewery (the thought of an ice cold beer definitely helped motivate those last five miles) – we wended our way back to College Park. But on the way we passed by the Citrus Bowl where the Electronic Daisy electronic dance music festival,  replete with ferris wheels, carnival rides and neon sound, was going on. Even in my house late at night, some miles away, I could hear the bass.

It wasn’t iconoclastic, somehow. It was just another way of finding the same sort of engagement I felt out there on the trail. It’s Florida.

The Real Mysteries of Puzzle Mountain, Maine

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Looking up toward Puzzle Mountain
Looking up toward Puzzle Mountain

Mysteries surround Puzzle Mountain, which was the site of last weekend’s Maine adventure.

After a successful rampage through the L.L. Bean clearance facility, we started the journey northeast to the weekend home of N’s parents. It’s a lovely old farmhouse near the Appalachian Trail. And on the way – the mysteries begin.

9. How does Google maps pick its prescribed route from point A to point B?  Somehow we found ourselves taking a one lane road dotted with potholes through multiple small towns. Extremely scenic, but I’m sure there was a more direct route.

8. What’s a bean supper? Every small town in Maine seems to have one on Saturday night.

7. What are confederate flags doing in Maine? That was a really weird one to me. Here in the south, we spend a lot of time working to take them down, but they seem to be going strong up north.

6. How many ways can you cook apples? Daughter A is an expert pie maker (a skill she did not inherit from her beloved mother) and brought a delicious apple pie up to Maine, which she somehow carried on an Uber ride to a train station, on a train to Portland, and on our trip in N’s Previa up to Northwest Maine. She returned to Boston with another two bags of apples, picked fresh off the tree. Unclear what can be done with a hundred or more apples.

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5. What mountain ranges can you see from Puzzle Mountain? We set off fairly early on Sunday for our trek up the mountain. It was a short drive to the trailhead, and the leaves were at their peak color. The trail climbs fairly steeply in sections, but is interspersed with enough flat sections to keep it interesting. The first part was all birch forest, pale yellow leaves set off against the peeling white bark of the somewhat spindly trunks. Finally, we came to an opening in the woods and could see across the patchwork valley to the White Mountains of New Hampshire and other unnamed ridges.

Birch forest
Birch forest

4. Where were all the people? It was Columbus Day weekend (or more correctly, Indigenous People’s weekend), and I would have expected at least some other hikers, if not the raging crowds we’d faced on Mt. Washington last year. But except for one other group who only made it to the first peak of the mountain, we saw absolutely no one.

Mount Washington in the distance
Mount Washington in the distance

3. Where did the blue blazes go? Most of the trail is nicely maintained. But after we reached the second and highest peak (a whopping 3100 feet), we took a loop trail down that was considerably overgrown. At one point, coming out onto a rock outcropping, it simply petered out into a tree. Although there were some remnants of blue paint on the rock, and a very misleading cairn, it turned out the real trail was in a completely different direction. And it turns out that daughter A’s belief that always going left was the right answer did not work.

2. Which way is down? Now, this seems like a question with an obvious answer. But not so. The descending trail seemed to have as many uphill parts as down, and at one point I was convinced we were corkscrewing ourselves around the mountain.

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1. Where is Puzzle Mountain? Some mysteries are best left unsolved. And I promised our hosts that I’d help keep it hidden!

Urban Hiking in Orlando – Art in Odd Places

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Art in Odd Places
Art in Odd Places

My neighbor, known as A, and I share a fence at home and a wall at work. It’s a long story as to how we became both work and residence neighbors. Suffice it to say that this past Thursday we agreed we would walk the 2 1/2 miles to work, all so that the two husbands could drive one car downtown to meet us for the Art in Odd Places event – and, since it was Friday, happy hour.

It was a grey day, as they nearly all have been this summer, but at least the humidity didn’t coalesce and rain all over us. By now urban hiking in downtown involves a lot of looking at cranes and bulldozers that form the backdrop for the Ultimate I4 construction project – which the developers already admit will never solve Central Florida’s traffic problems.

But those cranes are second only to the cranes from the multitude of apartments springing up throughout the city like mushrooms. Nearly every vacant lot in the downtown area has now been filled with 3 to 5 story buildings, usually with retail on the bottom and residences in top. Where the heck are the people going to come from to live in them? It’s a mystery. We’ve in-filled practically the whole city – it has swelled up so much that one good prick and the entire bubble will burst. We’ll see.

Mushrooms by the Performing Arts Center
Mushrooms by the Performing Arts Center

An urban hike, of course, can’t be complete without an adventure on the stairs with a backpack in an office building. Although A was eager to accompany me on a walk to work, strangely enough I’ve never succeeded in getting anyone to join me in the stair climbing/backpack toting portion of urban hiking. But I dutifully did my 108 flights up and 108 down (according to my FitBit, of course).

By now I’d managed to wear three different outfits at work – the morning walk to work clothes, the Friday casual ensemble, and the stair climbing gear. People in my office were presumably wondering if I’d done anything all day besides get ready for the next work out event.

As the end of the day rolled around it was time for outfit number 4 – the going out Friday night look. The two husbands successfully navigated their way through downtown to our building with one car and we embarked on the next stage of our urban hike – Art in Odd Places.

This was a curated collection of interactive visual, performance and sound pieces by artists from around the world, along several blocks of Magnolia Avenue.  Although we’d expected a cluster of events and installations, the works were scattered throughout the area – and some of them were indeed lurking behind walls or on fences. You did have to look, and just occasionally, would catch a glimpse of art in some everyday object that was not part of the show but that suddenly had taken on new meaning.  Orlando’s large homeless population, many of whom spend time at the History Center park where there were a number of installations, seemed to be enjoying the event as much as the expected hipster crowd.

Cemetery Flowers
Cemetery Flowers

A series of hands emerged from drain pipes at various odd points on the city streets. A field of paper bag mushrooms dotted the grounds of the performing arts center. A collage of silk flowers from cemeteries was designed to raise awareness of policing in America (yes, I also wondered how the artist came to have other people’s memorial flowers). A bed of nails, also covered in pages from the Bible with all the text covered in gold paint except the parts about women. Live status updates from silent human mannequins. And those are only snippets.

Status Updates
Status Updates

Where else could you go from such an erudite event but to the TexMex restaurant on Wall Street. Half price appetizers and $3 margaritas. After that, The Celt, an Irish pub, was the only natural next stop. Steak and mushroom pie for the husband (the whole night did seem to have a mushroom theme) and mussels for me.

Bed of Nails
Bed of Nails

As we departed The Celt, we were greeted by a human cat in a cage – with a small black and white kitten on a leash standing guard nearby.

Who's in the cage? Photo - A. Luby
Who’s in the cage? Photo – A. Luby

To top the evening off, I had given daughter #1 carte blanche to book a place in Portland, Maine for our upcoming trip. Next thing I knew we had rented an AirBnB that seems to include chickens. It was one of those nights.