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Mt Washington

A few notes…this is long overdue! I haven’t blogged since July, because I’ve been busy having fun. But this was too awesome not to blog about, so let’s travel back in time! Also, you should grab a beverage or a snack, this is going to be a long one.

Long before it started to feel like summer around here, I was thinking about what I was going to put on my Summer 2013 To Do List (which I never shared here, please forgive me). I can’t remember what first inspired the idea, but hiking Mt Washington in New Hampshire was at the very top of that list. I didn’t know if Pete would be interested, but I knew my friend Mark would be – Mark is an avid hiker and probably the person most responsible for my realization, about six years ago, that I love to hike. Most importantly, Mark is a “yes guy”. As in:

Sarah: Hey, I’m thinking about doing this crazy/random/adventurous/weird thing…you interested?

Mark: YES, of course.

I knew that all I needed to do to make Mt Washington happen was to plant the seed of thought in Mark’s head, so at some point a few months back I mentioned to him in passing that it was on my Summer To Do List….and Mark said YES! And then our friend Erica said “HELL YES!”. And that is how this came about:

Much like my trip to Melbourne, there are heaps of photos (see all of them here) and I could tell you stories about our trip for hours, but I’m going to (try to) spare you and take the “things I don’t want to forget” approach:

We stopped for gas and snacks just after getting off of Route 3 in the White Mountains, at a podunk general store. We were so focused on trying to decide what exactly we each wanted to snack on, that it took us a while to notice that the photos plastered all over the wall? They were 8.5×11 printouts of pro-gun slogans/photos/memes. Covering Every. Inch. of wall space that wasn’t dedicated to displaying product. This is one of the signs that was just next to the door.

We decided to drive to NH on Wednesday after work and stay overnight about fifteen minutes from the base of the mountain, so that we could get an early start without having to get up before dawn. We got to the hotel around 10:30 and as we were checking in we asked if the pool was still open. The kid checking us in pretty quickly replied “no”, so I asked what the pool hours were, knowing it was unlikely that it would be open before we were planning to leave the next morning, but figuring it was worth checking. That’s when our young friend backtracked a bit…”well, technically it’s open until eleven, but you won’t have enough time.” CHALLENGE ACCEPTED, young sir! It took us less than ten minutes to finish checking in, get to our room, change into bathing suits, and get ourselves to the pool. And then we enjoyed twenty glorious minutes of swimming and splashing and hot tubbing, before someone came to clean up and close down the pool. Erica and I are pretty convinced that if we had hidden Mark somewhere, we could have flirted and convinced the kid to let us stay longer.

It is so surreal at the summit! You have this grueling three hour hike, scrambling up boulders and picking your way through boulder fields…and then there are all these cars and people in flip flops drinking Starbucks iced coffees all over the place! And full on civilization. We were shopping at the gift shop! We had cell service! We mailed postcards! We bought lunch at a cafeteria! You launch straight back out of the wilderness (on trails where death is not that small of a possibility) and back into civilization with the snap of your fingers…and then you hop back on a trail and it’s gone again in a few minutes.

Trail names! We had Bruiser (surprisingly, not my trail name!), Frenchy, and Cai (that one’s me) to start…we added “Rob”, Viagra, and He Who Has No Trail Name after making friends at Lakes of the Clouds.

Speaking of making friends – that was easily one of my favorite parts of the trip! Lakes is a hut run by the Appalachian Mountain Club that is around 1,000 ft below the summit of Mt Washington. And it’s amazing. They feed you a crazy delicious family style dinner and breakfast, have bunk rooms (with mattress and pillow provided), and bathrooms with cold running water. The bunk rooms sleep between 10-15 people per room, I think – ours had 5 sets of triple bunks. And ours was, obviously, where all the cool kids were. We LOVED the people we met in our bunk room and had tons of fun getting to know them, generally harassing them by giving them trail names they didn’t want (I don’t know why he’s not proud to be Viagra!), and forcing them into playing crazy eights with us past lights out (or “poor man’s Uno”, as our new English friend Rob – trail name “Rob” – dubbed it).

Post-hike swimming (in the lakes for which Lakes of the Clouds hut is named). It started with just soaking our feet in the cold water. Then Mark went in wearing his boxers. Then Erica was convinced to go in wearing her tank top and underwear. Then I was convinced to go in wearing my capris and sports bra (and heart rate monitor…oops! No worries – it still works). It was pretty awesome, despite how cold the water was. Later, while playing crazy eights, we were talking about our respective swims and Rob commented “I felt like that swim really put hair on my chest. Like I could actually feel it growing when I jumped in” and I was all “Oh my God! ME TOO!” ;)

We made friends on the trails, too – I love that it’s so natural in that environment. When you’re all bumping into each other hiking around a mountain, it seems like everyone is super nice and ready to chat. We met Joanna, who was participating in Seek the Peek, along Lions Head Trail on our way up. She and I chatted for a while as we picked our way through the boulder fields – about the mountain, hiking, and how lucky she is to live with the White Mountains in her backyard. Then we ran into her again at the summit – she’s the one that took the first photo in this post! On our second day, we bumped into two parents looking for their kids. We chatted with them about what trails they were hiking and what we were doing and then went on our way. We ran into them again later, after they had reunited with their kids (who aren’t really kids – they’re in college) and were chatting again. As we were heading past them, their daughter looked at Erica and I and said “hey, it’s the crazy eights girls”. Maybe we were a little rowdy?

This conversation highlighting my complete lack of US History knowledge:

Erica: “Pierce – was he a president?”

Sarah: “If it wasn’t on West Wing, I don’t know!”

Fog, fog, fog. You guys, there was so. much. fog. While I love getting to the top of a mountain and seeing the sweeping views you are rewarded with…there’s something pretty awesome about hiking in the fog, too. It’s eerie and awesome and gross and beautiful all at once.

2 Comments

by Sarah G on September 5, 2013 • Permalink

Posted in friends, New Hampshire, self portraits, Uncategorized

Posted by Sarah G on September 5, 2013

https://mymonotonouslife.com/2013/09/05/mt-washington/

How I found my people

I have been wanting to blog about this for a long time, but every time I sit down to write it gets looooooong. Here’s the shortest version of this I could manage:

I’ve got great people. My family is amazing, although for the most part they are 500 miles away. I’m incredibly lucky to have a group of friends that I’ve known since high school – twenty years now! – and am very close to. I mentioned our Boston Posse friends when I posted about out trip to Melbourne. They filled a gap that I don’t think I realized I had until I met them: they were my city family. We all lived within a quick T trip of each other (and in some cases, a short walk from each other), we were all up for just about any adventure, and we were all ready to get drinks or dinner without much advance planning. When contracts started expiring and our Boston Posse friends started moving back home or somewhere new (London, Amsterdam, Rome, Brisbane, Melbourne, Oregon, Atlanta), Pete and I really felt that empty gap.

But Boston is a notoriously hard city to meet people in, and I actually think it’s that much harder for someone like me: I grew up locally and have a social and support network….in the suburbs. When transplants meet each other, they have that much in common, but that missing link isn’t there for me to build a friendship on. Pete is a transplant – although he has been here for twelve years now – but he’s also an introvert. With the deck stacked against us, I spent a while trying to figure out where to find the community I was looking for.

It wasn’t until we moved to Quincy that we did it. I was trying to form a running habit that had long escaped me so I went looking for a local running club. See…I’m inherently lazy, I need the accountability of meeting a workout buddy to get off the couch. In other words, I’m a dog runner. A google search turned up only one option in Quincy, but it was a dormant group on meetup.com: The Quincy Running Dawgs I emailed the organizer, Harvey, asking if he would be willing to let me post events – I was planning to run a few nights a week after work, so why not just post them and see if anyone showed up? He was happy to oblige, so I quickly mapped out a short route that met somewhere public that was within walking distance of our new apartment.

I’ll skip the entire Quincy Running Dawgs history lesson and jump to the present…you guys! I found my people! When I first posted those runs there were only four or five of us that showed up. It took about a year for the club to turn out regular, sizable attendance, but as that happened I quickly realized that we were super lucky: everyone that joined and started showing up was friendly, easy going, encouraging, and had a good sense of humor. Our group has grown from four to forty regulars. We run together four times a week, we race together monthly, and we get drinks or brunch together in between.

More importantly, this group has spawned a lot of relationships that don’t rely on an event posted on meetup.com to bring people together. Pete and I have made friends who we sometimes text on a Sunday afternoon in order to make plans for Sunday dinner. One of them was awesome enough to cat sit for us while we were in Australia for two weeks in April! Sometimes during the football season, when I leave the house to avoid having to watch it I come home and find Harvey drinking beers and watching football with Pete. When we had no heat and power during the blizzard, it was one of our running club friends who took us in, made us coffee and frozen pizza, and let us soak up her heat to get warm.

This running club was the community I was looking for all along. They are my people, and I’m repeatedly grateful for having found them!

7 Comments

by Sarah G on June 10, 2013 • Permalink

Posted in friends, Quincy, Running

Posted by Sarah G on June 10, 2013

https://mymonotonouslife.com/2013/06/10/how-i-found-my-people/

Melbourne

I will spare you all an onslaught of photos…you can find a lot (almost 200) of the photos I took on our trip over at Flickr….the ones here are a few of my favorites. We spent two weeks in Melbourne in April (it already feels like it was ages ago), and it was awesome. I could probably go on for hours about our trip, but I’ll spare you that, too. Here are the things I don’t want to forget:

– Pete’s first experience with the smaller portion sizes: In the Sydney airport, Pete went to McDonald’s to get a coffee (we had just deplaned after a 19 hour flight from LAX and were on hour 27 of our trip. Coffee was in order). We proceeded to the gate to reboard our plane and were chatting about how Pete had survived his first trans-Pacific flight, how the quick layover at LAX was the furthest west he’s ever been in the US, and how he was starting his first visit to Australia – “so many firsts!” I said. He replied “and it’s my first time getting a baby-sized coffee!” I laughed, knowing that it would take a day or two to get used to how everything in Oz is smaller – the cars, the houses, the portion sizes. What I didn’t realize was how hung up Pete would be on his first experience with it. Thirty minutes into our flight (the last, and shortest, of 4 legs), Pete shows me the screen of his phone and says “that’s how much I paid for my baby-sized coffee!” and I see that he’s got the currency exchange app open and is shocked to learn that he’s paid something like 2.85 USD for a coffee the size of your average sippy cup.

– The heartache when we heard about the Boston Marathon bombing, and the frantic tracking down of all our friends. The worry when we learned that our friend Ryan had been injured (but was “okay”) and waited to learn more details about her condition. The gratitude for the technology which meant that we were able to keep in touch, live, with friends at home while we all tried to digest what had happened and ensure that our loved ones were safe. The comfort of being with friends who could understand our shock and sadness because they have also called Boston home. The shock of walking into Fed Square and looking up to see video of the explosions on the jumbotron. The tears I fought every time it came up in conversation with strangers over the next two weeks.

– Feeling so at home in a city so far away. From the comfort of having the same standard conversation openers (weather, sports) to having somewhere to get coffee on every corner (although far more independent businesses than we have in Boston), to the luck of having a number of friends who live in Melbourne…I never once felt like I was in a foreign city. It was so hard to leave – partly because I didn’t want to say goodbye to all the friends who we get to see so rarely, partly because I feel very much in tune with the Aussie mindset, and partly because I fell in love with the city of Melbourne itself.

– Ros and Chris’ wedding: The look on Chris’ face when he saw her coming down the aisle. Ros’ inability to look Chris in the eye during the ceremony because she refused to start crying. The cat that wandered behind them mid-ceremony. Watching two people so perfect for each other bring together their families and friends for an amazingly fun party. The reappearance of Pedro, a máquina de bailando!

– Cider cider everywhere! Not that I was worried about finding a beer alternative to drink while we were there, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that cider is all over the place in Australia these days. I would happily have managed with champers and wine for two weeks, but I loved having a new-to-me cider almost every time we were out. Pete certainly outdid me with his multitude of beer paddles, but I may have managed to try as many ciders makers (are they also brewers? I don’t know the lingo) as he tried different brewers!

– You guys! Kangaroos are SO SOFT. More on that in another post.

– You guys! Koalas are SO UGLY. And not particularly nice. On the day that we drove the Great Ocean Road, we were directed to a specific spot: take the turn to the Cape Otway Light, drive until you go over the cattle grate, then pull over and look up. We were skeptical, but we saw ten wild koalas hanging out in the trees! And they really are ugly! The one that was on the ground was hunting for tourists to attack, but luckily koalas are slow and the tourists were smart enough to get out of the way. An actual koala attack would have made a great story, but we were happy that we didn’t have to figure out how to get emergency medical help for an innocent tourist.

– We spent about half a day in Bendigo (I really enjoyed annoying Pete by repeatedly saying “let’s a-go to Bendigo!” all day), mainly for the purpose of going on a tour of a working gold mine. It was pretty rad, but my favorite part was when Dale, our tour guide, was referring to how the miners were paid when it first opened. As contractors, they were paid “per foot – or in more modern terms, per meter”. Because imperial units is so antiquated, who would use those measurements these days?!

There is so much more that happened on our vacation, but these the bigger things that stick out, and a few of the little things that make me smile and I don’t ever want to forget. Check out the rest of my photos on Flickr if you want to see and read more about what we did with our two weeks!

4 Comments

by Sarah G on May 29, 2013 • Permalink

Posted in friends, Melbourne, not my animal, pete, self portraits, Travel

Posted by Sarah G on May 29, 2013

https://mymonotonouslife.com/2013/05/29/melbourne/

So…June happened…

Umm, you guys? Are you still there? I would apologize for the lack of time I’ve spent here, only I’m not sorry! This summer has been flying by, and between some stressful work stuff and a lot of really fun personal stuff…well, there hasn’t been much in the way of pictures or blog stuff. I’m slowly catching up with the pictures, so I thought I’d catch you all up here, as well! When I started writing this post it included everything since my last post here…and then I realized it was way too much for one post, so here’s our June!

(This may take a while, you should maybe grab a beverage and get comfy.)

Back before even the unofficial start of summer, we bought a picnic table. There’s been a fair amount of this going on all summer long:

Sometimes there are neighbors involved, sometimes there are movies being watched on laptops, and sometimes there are guitars being played.

In early June, I ran a 5-mile race. This is what I look like when I’m running…although I’m sure if there’s no camera pointed at me, I look less happy about it:

Unfortunately I don’t have pictures to prove it, but the night after that race I went to see Lana in La Boheme, and it was awesome! I do have pictures of the following day, however, when I went to the (poorly executed) Food Truck Festival at UMass Boston with a few friends. We overcame the event’s poor execution with a divide-and-conquer plan, which led to lots of tasty treats and slightly less standing in line than most people experienced. It also led to me discovering the amazing corn salad in the photo, which I have since managed to recreate twice and am obsessed with. A beautiful day on the waterfront with good company and lots of good food…can’t really complain!

The following weekend, Pete ran eight miles from our house to the Harpoon Brewery with our running club, while I drank sangria and celebrated this little one’s third birthday. I’m pretty sure I got the better end of the deal on that one! ;)

Our last weekend in June was a long one, and we flew out to Wisconsin to see Pete’s family and celebrate his cousin Mitch’s high school graduation. We flew into Milwaukee and spent a few hours exploring downtown before we headed to Pete’s parents. We had fun in our short wander, and found more cool stuff than we anticipated. We spent a lot of our time wandering noticing all the differences between Boston and Milwaukee: one month of parking in downtown MKE = one and a half days of parking in downtown BOS. Real Estate is clearly not a premium in MKE, as evidenced by the abundance of above ground parking lots and lack of parking garages. All of the sidewalks in MKE are stamped with the year they poured (and often who poured them), while in BOS our sidewalks are only sometimes stamped, and only with the company that poured them. When it comes to the waterfront, you can see through the clear, blue water in MKE and well…you definitely can’t say that about the water in BOS! The rest of our weekend was spent catching up with Pete’s family and relaxing, which was much needed.

Upon returning, we celebrated this guy’s birthday with our running club. Our running club is pretty amazing, and I really need to spend a separate post talking about that some time.

And then? It was July.

Nerd Fest 2012

I know a lot of gamer-geeks, so when Penny Arcade Expo comes to Boston I hear a lot about it. I’m fascinated by nerd culture, am friends with a handful of folks that work in the industry, and know more than the average non-nerd about things like live action role playing, 8 bit music, and nerdcore. This means that I’m super interested in going to PAX to observe, but not super interested in paying to do it. I emailed Norm (above) earlier in the week to let him know that if someone had a three day pass but didn’t want to go all three days, or was going to leave early one day and I could borrow their pass for the afternoon, I would love to do so. I woke up this morning to a text from Norm asking if I really wanted to go and if I was willing to check out the board games with him, and of course I said yes, and then got overly excited.

I picked the wrong day to go (well, I didn’t really pick. There was a problem with my approach) because it turns out that there were at least five different panels on Friday and Saturday that I would have loved to see. I would have loved to see the concert on Saturday night, and there were a few other events going on Friday and Saturday that I thought looked really cool…and on Sunday there was next to nothing on the schedule that excited me – just a panel that I was only half-interested in, but a friend was speaking on. Also: not nearly as many folks in costume show up on Sunday. Bummer!

Norm and I walked the expo floor and checked the lines for a few things he hadn’t seen yet (they were all longer than he wanted to wait in), entered a raffle to try to win him fancy computery things, and filled out a few surveys to get free t-shirts (I gave mine to Pete – except the one I got that says “may contain awesome” on the front, that one I kept). We checked out the board game demos and taught ourselves how to play one game, which Norm ended up buying (and I even liked, despite the intimidating and über-nerdy character cards involved).

In the end, I realized that next year I really should cough up the money for the three day pass and then spend most of my time at the panels and events, while making sure to work my way through the expo floor at least once in order to update Pete’s collection of free t-shirts.

My Monotonous Life