Sunday, June 04, 2006

Remember me?

I tried writing an entry last weekend but for some reason I never got around to finish it. I’ve been pretty busy: my new job barely gives me time to go to the bathroom during work hours, let alone take my lunch hour to write an entry.

This weekend I did something I thought I’d never be able to enjoy: I stayed in motels. I don’t care that it had plastic bedspreads from the last century. It was awesome. We watched Animal Planet’s America’s Funniest Pet Videos on television. Sweet, sweet cable.

It was raining non stop from the moment we got to the Adirondacks, so camping became out of the question, especially since we own a cheap-ass Canadian Tire 70$ tent. We were heading for a weekend of hiking, but we ended up driving up the mountain we were supposed to climb by foot. Whiteface Mountain. Yes, we drove up a mountain, 4,800ft. That is pathetic.

When I hiked up Whiteface last year, I resented the people who drove up there, parked their cars, and took an elevator to reach the peak (instead of taking a few stairs up the top). I mean, you spend a whole lot of energy walking up a mountain for about 3 hours and suddendly when you approach the summit you can hear a Harley Davidson and a couple of SUV's. When you finaly summit you get to sit down and eat your lunch next to a lady wearing high heels bitching about the fact that she had to walk up the stairs because the elevator was not working.

This year we became the same people I resented, those same lazy tourists.

But it was brutal on the summit: the rain had a winter blizzard quality to it and I did not trust my feet to keep me grounded to the peak. The winds and stinging rain sent us scrambling for cover. That’s how bad it was up there. The mountain pathways had been flooded. It rained a lot. And then it rained some more. The elevator guy was incredulous, but nice enough to let us go on top anyway, but not without warning us about the conditions up there.

So a weekend of planned hiking and camping ended up being a weekend of tv watching, beer drinking, darts shootting, and generally getting wet. It was great.