Climbing Mountains
Last weekend I had the privilege of getting on a plane and going out to see my brother. He technically lives in Calgary, but I think he basically lives in the mountains. He's always snowboarding, hiking, mountaineering, and probably anything else you can do there. So I asked him to take me hiking while I was out there. We had originally thought we'd go out for two days, but about halfway through the first day, that plan changed:) Look at these views!!
I'm going to try to minimize how badly I did and how much I whined, but I will share a few thoughts from those seven and a half hours.
"I am soooooo getting dessert tonight"
"I have three children, I cannot die on a mountain"
"Was I absolutely insane??"
"God please just help me not fall down right now"
"I think its good for character building to do some things that seem impossible sometimes" a few hours later.... "This is what I get for opening my mouth about character building!"
"I don't know why I thought climbing up a mountain would be easier than this!"
We stopped on that first peak on the left for lunch and then climbed the second one. After that was a long ridge walk, which had some of the scariest places but was really gorgeous.
I tried to take a picture with my shoe so you could see how steep it was here, but I don't think the picture does it justice. And while my shoe is in the picture, let me just wander a little and tell you about these shoes. I've always had fairly big feet, but then they grew with each pregnancy. I ended up with size 12 feet. Yup. I can sometimes get away with 11, especially in sandals but really I'm a 12. I haven't bought women's running shoes in at least 10 years, but the men's always feel wrong. I decided that I was finally going to get some women's. I went to a store in London that specializes in sizes 10-15. Of course, they only had up to 11 in the store. Frustrating, but they would ship them to my house. Ok, I ordered them. Four days later, my husband texts me a picture and asks if these are really the shoes I picked out. Imagine the biggest, ugliest, plain white running shoes. Um, I wanted women's so that I could have pretty girly shoes. Oh yeah, and because the men's don't fit right, but really I wanted pretty running shoes:) So, before I ordered with the same company, I decided to try a couple of other websites. Do you know that I couldn't find a single other website in Canada that sold a size 12 women's running shoe? I thought about writing a blog post about how I feel discriminated against, but decided it probably wasn't that important:) After ten days of shopping, searching, browsing, and getting the wrong ones, I finally have cute shoes:)
I still have a smile here because we haven't yet tried the very steep downhill portion of the hike:) But I do have to say, it was absolutely gorgeous. And although I probably would never have attempted it if I had known what I was getting into, I'm really glad that I didn't know so that I could experience it. What a day.
I also must say that I have the best brother. When I was terrified and holding onto every rock I could find, he was relaxed with his hands in his pockets! Yet, he had so much patience with me and took the time to teach me and never once complained about the every 45 seconds breaks I took on the last peak. When my brother comes back to Ontario for a visit I have to share him with the whole family over here, but when I went there for a few days I was able to have him all to myself. We talked a lot about music and his newfound love for throat singing, I unloaded about a bunch of my problems, we had serious talks, times of comfortable silence, and an entire morning of Netflix and smoothies. It was an amazing weekend in several ways and I will definitely be going back. I just may ask for a slightly easier trail.