After tossing and turning a good deal of the night, I decided to skip the 7AM stretch and Qi Gong class. I was up plenty early but I spent the earliest part of the day sipping black hotel room coffee and watching a couple of episodes from the second TV season of This American Life on DVD.
Breakfast was a tiny sliver of honeydew melon, followed by “salsa scrambled eggs” with a dry whole wheat English muffin and a teaspoon of some indeterminate flavor of jam. The coffee was weak and bleak. I may wind up learning how to drink it black here in Vermont.
I chose to go on the nature walk, which is the name they give to the alleged beginner’s level hike. We were going to Mount Tom, which overlooks the town of Woodstock, VT. There are several different locales for these walks, and today’s was described as “mostly flat with gentle, rolling hills.” The ride over there was breathtaking, the road snaking through the mountains alongside a glistening stream.
The first sound we heard as we exited the van was the unmistakable c-r-r-rack of timber being felled. All eyes raised to witness a huge tree coming down in slow motion somewhere up what looked like the trail we were supposed to be following into the woods. The hiking guides wisely decided to take a detour around the tree-felling project, so we fell in behind the lovely little 20 – something Kate, who started clambering up the trail like a bat out of hell.
Those first few minutes of this path re-defined “gentle, rolling hills” for me in a hurry. Without so much as a polite preamble, we were trotting up what must have been a 35% grade. I figured that this must just be a brief ascent that would lead us to the comfy “mostly flat” part, sort of like taking a flight of stairs to get to the second floor. But it went on for what seemed like forever. We’d get to a plateau, only to have to trudge up another several stories around the next bend. Needless to say, I was huffing and chuffing and cursing my ill luck before we’d barely begun.
Fortunately, it didn’t last forever and I wound up having a pretty good time commiserating with a few other laggards. The trail did eventually even out and about a half hour later we came to a lovely man-made pond, which we proceeded to circumnavigate at a relatively leisurely pace.
The disaster du jour occurred on the way back to the trailhead (see how quickly I pick up the lingo?). Somehow, while I was mucking around in my backpack during a short breath-catching pause, I managed to pry open the drinking flap from my second water bottle while it was mostly upside down. Everything got a good drenching, including my digital camera, my street shoes and my sack lunch. But I did enjoy the sensation of dripping water down my shorts and legs as we descended back to the parking lot.
I was absolutely toast on the van ride back to the inn. I somehow managed to make it back to my room, crawled into the shower and then collapsed onto the bed for an afternoon respite. I’d scheduled a Swedish massage for later in the afternoon and am now basking in the glow of that while I await dinnertime. I’m not getting my hopes up for that, however.
