"It'll never fit!"

Wednesday, September 21, 2011

I was up, showered, eating and reading the sports page by the time John arrived a little after 5 a.m. As we began to pack the car and it became readily apparent that we’d be squeezed in like sardines, I began to let my irritation show. I knew that Paul had more than camping gear with him…he’d be on the road for three weeks after our camping trip and had a couple of boxes of things to bring along…and could see that there just wasn’t room. I cursed myself for not insisting on taking the van, which would have easily handled our needs. John tried placating me. “Dude…we’ll make it fit. After all…it’s just Paul in the back seat and who cares how much shit he has piled up all around him. We’ll be comfortable,” he said. Okay…that much was true.

We re-entered the kitchen from outside to pack up the six turkey sandwiches I laid out on the counter for the drive up. Dakota had been outside with us while we were shoving things in the car, but on one of John’s trips back inside, he’d let her follow. I stared at the counter where the sandwiches used to be and looked at Dakota who was slowly slinking up the stairs to the safety of her cage. She looked full. “I hope you weren’t counting on those smoked turkey sandwiches,” I said to John. He was looking at the counter with incredulity. “She ate them all? There’s not a crumb anywhere,” he said, admiringly. I thought about a forty-pound dog eating 6 sandwiches in 60 seconds…which would be the equivalent of a 160-pound man eating 24 sandwiches. I wanted to be angry but who was I kidding? I’d left them in snout’s reach and dared her to eat them.

We got to Paul’s place and as we pulled into the driveway and John’s headlights illuminated the mountain of gear stacked outside his door, I blew a gasket again. “This…will…never…work!” John explained my storage issues to Paul as I eyed the watermelon in the stack and started laughing. “Really, Paul? A watermelon in the car? How would we even eat it if we could squeeze it in?” He looked at me puzzled…as if traveling with a watermelon in the back seat of a car on a 9-hour trip was completely normal behavior and said, “I brought a knife.”

Paul is a packing aficionado and after rearranging everything we had…and leaving the watermelon home…found that he was comfortable and that we’d be able to proceed. We made the trip in about 9 hours, arriving in Keene Valley around 4 p.m. I made a spaghetti dinner at the trailhead so we wouldn’t have to carry the food and stoves into the camp site…which would help in keeping bears from visiting. We loaded packs and with about 40 pounds on my back, hiked the .6 miles into Round Pond and our camping destination for the next two nights.

The hike in wasn’t much of a workout, but combined with foraging for burnable wood through dense foliage, found that I’d sweat enough to need a cleaning in the pond. The water was cold but refreshing and Paul had a nice fire going by the time I returned. We had a pleasant night sitting around a fire and talking families, climbing, our lives and man trash. It was another day of serenity in the back country.

Hike duration: 25-30 minutes
Training Heart Rate: 70 to 120 bpm.
Calories burned during workout: 250.