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Don’t Look Down!

Insane cliff faces, rocky trails, and stunning vistas were the stars of today’s adventure

I’ve never been fond of heights.  I remember refusing to sit anywhere but on the floor in the middle of our Ferris Wheel car in Niagara Falls at a young age.  In 8th grade, I practically had a nervous breakdown on our class rock climbing trip when I stood roped and harnessed at the top of a 150-foot cliff and had to lean backwards over the edge to rappel down.

In my adult life, not much has changed between me and heights.  When J and I rode the Ferris Wheel in Paris last summer, I was nervous (although I did sit in my assigned seat for the entire ride).  When we stood at the top of the aptly named “Jump Off” in The Smokies  two months ago, I couldn’t wait to continue our hike a bit further from the edge.  Today, I pushed the limits of my fears and tackled some challenging trails in Acadia National Park.

The park has two “hiking” trails that are often referred to as “technical rock climbing without the ropes.”  These trails are The Precipice (a 0.9 mile trail that basically scales the side of an 930-foot cliff) and The Beehive (a slightly smaller cliff at 0.6 miles and 520 feet).  This time of year The Precipice is closed due to peregrine falcon nesting season (sweet!), but The Beehive is open.  J was excited for the hike, and after watching several YouTube videos and online reviews (that didn’t help much), I reluctantly agreed to make the trip.

While we lingered over coffee at the B&B this morning, we looked at our pocket hiking guidebook (purchased for a mere $3.50 at our local coffee/used bookstore, Crackskulls) and planned a hike that would bring us up The Beehive, across two miles of ridgeline to the summit of Champlain Mountain, and down over Huguenot Head on a trail made up of nearly 1,500 pink granite steps (interpret that last word loosely…).  At the bottom, we would trot a short three miles along the Park Loop Road to get back to our car.  It all sounded amazing, but I needed to get past The Beehive to enjoy the rest.

“Just keep going and don’t look down,” was my mantra for the first hour of the day.  Even near the bottom of The Beehive, we had to use iron rungs secured into the rocks to get from one ledge of the trail to the next.  A little further up, we resorted to crawling over a series of iron bars laid out like a ladder across a 20-foot drop.  The two most difficult spots included a double series of iron bars that brought us almost straight up a rocky patch about 300 feet into the climb and a corner that required the use of one iron rung to scoot around it while stepping over a gap in the cliff’s edge.

Despite feeling weak in the knees, we made it to the top along with several other climbers, including a group from Dallas on their second-ever hike.  (Their first was Mt. Dorr…yesterday.)   It’s true that many people journey up The Beehive each year without issue, but before we started out, I wasn’t sure that would be the case for us.  By the end of the day, we not only conquered The Beehive (and my fear of heights), but we enjoyed the open ridgeline walk and 360-degree views of the Atlantic, Mt. Desert Island and downtown Bar Harbor from the summit of Champlain Mountain.  It was totally worth the terror.  -M

Posted by  |  May 12, 2012 | Categories: Hiking, National Parks | Tags: , , , , , , , | 7 Comments

Test Driving Acadia’s Carriage Roads

Clockwise, from L: Jenn modeling a signpost; Marty rocking his ride; taking a break by Jordan Stream; Signpost 16; Jordan Pond and The Bubbles ridge; private gatehouse within park

After a five-week break to sort out things on the domestic front, we’re pleased to report that our National Park road trip is back on track!  This week’s destination: Acadia National Park on Mt. Desert Island in Maine.  We first visited the park last spring just for a weekend, and we’ve returned this year for an extended stay.  We’ll spend four nights at a cozy B&B in downtown Bar Harbor and then an additional four nights at a campground within the park.

Acadia National Park was the first park established east of the Mississippi River.   It is also notable for the fact that its designation as a park was spearheaded by local residents, many of whom (like George Dorr and the Rockefellers) were wealthy owners of summer homes on the island.  Today, a handful of private residences are still scattered throughout the park, and sections of the famous carriage roads on private land abutting the park are off-limits to bicyclists.  I’m not sure of the behind-the-scenes land politics, but as a casual visitor, it seems the public-private boundaries enjoy an easy coexistence.

We hadn’t been on our bikes in several months, so before heading out to tackle 20 or 30 (or more!) miles of road, we opted to start with a short 10-mile loop between Northeast Harbor and Jordan Pond.  Although there are more than 40 miles of carriage roads to explore, it’s pretty hard to get lost.  Roads are well-marked with numbered signposts that also include directional signage for popular park destinations like Jordan Pond House or Eagle Lake.  The Park Service also provides a carriage road map that indicates mileage between signs.

Those of you who haven’t been to Acadia might share my initial romantic vision that carriage roads are pleasant and flat, probably made of packed dirt or maybe even paved.  They are not.  While they are indeed pleasant, they are the opposite of flat.  They are groomed with crushed gravel (which can be loose and slippery under mountain bike tires) and they rise and fall repeatedly, climbing and descending hundreds of feet depending on the route you select.

Today’s route was a new stretch of trail for us, and the climb started immediately from the parking lot.  Although our legs and lungs are well-conditioned from running, we were winded and weary at the top of some of today’s hills, quads burning.  But the rewards were worth the effort.  We enjoyed sunny skies, sweeping vista, secret streams, and of course…speeding downhill while grinning like kids, trying not to lose complete control of our bikes or eat facefuls of gravel.  In that way and many others, the day was a great success.  And it’s only Day 1! –J.

Posted by  |  May 11, 2012 | Categories: Biking, National Parks | Tags: , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

We and Bobby McGee

L to R: Rainy, cozy trip to storage; saying goodbye to la casa; a well-packed Sal; Jenn kicking it passenger-style; Marty working on a post from Bar Harbor

“Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” –Janis Joplin (courtesy Kris Kristofferson, et. al.)

And we now—officially, after months of planning and hoping and maneuvering—have very little left to lose.  As of noon today, we sold the house and hit the road without an address.  To clarify, we have a P.O. Box where mail will be forwarded, but we do not have a physical address.  We are voluntarily homeless (which brings with it a number of sociological issues which J. plans to discuss in a future post, naturally.)  (Insert shout out to anyone who has agreed to host us during the next three months…)

Over the past few days, we’ve both been singing Janis Joplin’s version of “Me and Bobby McGee” while working to move our stuff into storage, sell the house, and take the final step toward freedom.  During this time, music has been a critical factor in our sanity and our motivation.  We’ve bee-bopped around the house:  packing, cleaning, moving, and singing.  We’ve raged and hip-hopped and rocked and sung the blues.  Throughout the process, the lyrics of “Me and Bobby McGee” proved to be especially relevant:  “Freedom’s just another word for  / nothing left to lose.”  They were sung quietly while carrying trash bags to the garage, belted out in the shower while we scrubbed off the basement grime, and hummed while packing boxes of stuff we wondered if we really needed.

Yet Janis isn’t the only one who’s been keeping us company.  Adam Ezra understood why we were “Takin’ Off Today.”  Air Traffic Controller knew that all of the hoops we’ve been jumping through were “just a test / test 1, 2, 3…”  And The Hold Steady explained that “we were young and we were so in love / and I guess we just needed space.”

But perhaps Modest Mouse captured it best: “I know that starting over  is not what life’s about / but my thoughts were so loud I couldn’t hear my mouth.”  It’s not often that you change most (or all!) of the key components of your life, but sometimes your thoughts are too loud to ignore.  We’ve changed so much with our physical and professional and personal selves that this financial transition out of the house seemed natural.  It was necessary to complete our journey into a place of total flexibility.

We have no idea what the future will bring, but for now, being on the road—traveling, reading, experiencing life and writing—is good enough… “good enough for me and my Bobby McGee.”  -M&J

Posted by  |  May 10, 2012 | Categories: Getting Ready, Home, Lodging, Music | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Cooking Up Something Good

Tasty victuals and critical productivity tools...

Today was the first day in weeks I’ve been able to take a deep breath and fully exhale. We had no plans except those of our own choosing, and no schedule to keep except to get a run in before dark. We slept a little later than usual, huddled under the covers in the guest room. (In a story too long and boring to tell here, we sold the bed we’ve been sleeping in at the yard sale last weekend, and we’re keeping the heat off so we don’t have to pay for another oil delivery before we sell the house next week. It’s really a circus of the absurd around here.) Once we finally rallied downstairs, we cooked up a delicious breakfast of lentil hash and eggs scrambled with sweet onions and cheese. We sipped cups of coffee and read the news and paid bills. We relished the return to quiet normalcy, to a day when we did not have strangers or appraisers or buyers pushing their agendas on us. We drove to Portsmouth to procure boxes and tape for packing, grab a few fresh veggies at the grocery store, and pick up a replacement screen canopy for our upcoming camping trip to Acadia National Park. We were back by early afternoon and each headed out for a run. Distance didn’t matter today; just getting out there mattered. Our next race is in Virginia on Memorial Day weekend, so we have plenty of time to train. What we needed today were fresh air and clear minds, and we found both. We capped the day with a delicious dinner collaboration, one so tasty that it will probably make its detailed way to my food and fitness blog soon. The short version: spicy apple tofu roasted over fresh asparagus and paired with sweet potato fries and a chipotle-lime aoili. Pick a word: delicious, fantastic, balanced, amazing. They all apply to dinner, and they apply to the rest of the day as well. I hope your Monday was as balanced as ours, but if not, there’s always hope for tomorrow. -J

Posted by  |  April 30, 2012 | Categories: Food & Drink, Getting Ready, Home, Running | Tags: , , , , , | 3 Comments

The Art of Losing

Before and after the garage sale...

We’ve been losing a lot of things lately: weight, earrings, and the lottery, among others.  We’ve even been losing track of time, spending hours in a dusty basement sorting through boxes of stuff we’ve been lugging around for years.  Last weekend, we took a break from purging to attend the Massachusetts Poetry Festival in Salem.  This weekend, we held our first (and only!) yard sale to rid ourselves of extraneous possessions.  How are all of these events related?

One of the sessions at the festival featured a reading of a favorite poem we hadn’t heard or read in a while.  The poem is “One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop, and the opening stanza goes like this:

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Bishop goes on to suggest that we should all “practice losing farther, losing faster”…and that seems to be the theme of our April this year.  We started the month staring down a houseful of stuff, wondering how we would decide what to keep when we moved into our next  place…a much smaller, cooler, easier to handle space, by design.  Sometimes those keep-or-ditch decisions were easy, but often they were difficult, getting caught up in memories and emotions and absurd hangups on financial value or sunk costs.

But as the month progressed, we seemed to get better at losing.  Every box we touched became easier to go through, every letter we read became easier to recycle, and every possession we evaluated became easier to part with.  We sent hundreds of items home with new owners yesterday, with the intent that their useful lives be extended in someone else’s  care.  We then took most of the remaining items to a local non-profit with the same outcome in mind.  A handful of leftovers wait patiently in our garage to meet their fate at our town’s recycling center.

It turns out that the art of losing is difficult to begin, but with a little practice (Write it!) it isn’t hard to master. –J&M

In honor of the festival and national poetry month, we suggest you check out Bishop’s entire poem, available on the Poetry Foundation’s website here:  http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/176996

Posted by  |  April 29, 2012 | Categories: Getting Ready, Home, Writing | Tags: , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Spring Cleaning

It’s possible—strike that…it’s a fact—that being home is more frenzied than being on the road.  In the two weeks since we returned from Key West, we’ve had zero plans on exactly one day—and that one day was spent sorting through the contents of our kitchen cabinets.  In that same period of time, we’ve managed to put up just four blog posts.  Not because we haven’t had much to say, but because we’ve been distracted and exhausted.  So what’s been keeping us so busy?  Where to begin?  We’ve gone under agreement to sell our house, celebrated holidays and family birthdays, run a half marathon, babysat for my niece, gone to concerts, hung out with friends from near and far, played charity trivia, and found a new place to live.  The new place won’t be ready until July, so we’ve also been working out arrangements for two months of temporary living…which for us will be a combination of campgrounds, friends’ homes, and an occasional hotel.  Whatever isn’t going in our car for those two months is going in storage, so we’re spending a fair amount of time sorting through things and being tough about what we really need on a daily basis.  And if things don’t make that cut, we’re deciding whether they have a place in our lives at all.  It’s a good exercise to go through, and our test trip a few weeks ago helped clarify our requirements.  This time, we’ll be wandering for six additional weeks, but our gear requirements won’t be much different.  It’s easy to live simply when you’re simply living.  Although the simplification process might seem minimalist, we’re actually taking our own maximalist approach to life these days…in other words, attempting to maximize the utility and value and enjoyment from each object we retain.  That doesn’t always mean the smallest or cheapest items; on the contrary, it often means trading quality for quantity.  It also means being very thoughtful at the point of consumption (i.e., time of purchase) to ensure any new items won’t end up in a donation pile the next time we move.  It’s rather depressing to sort items for a garage sale and realize how many things should have never entered our lives in the first place…how many dishes or vases or electronics or souvenirs should have never been purchased.  And it’s not just the wasted money that’s depressing.  It’s the wasted materials and resources along the way.  No one needs those things, and certainly not that many things.  More often than not, things won’t make you happy.  They’ll suffocate you and depress you and clog your closets and drain your bank accounts.  If you haven’t already done so, stop watching commercials on TV, stop looking through catalogs, and stop buying things you don’t need.  You’ll be happier and better off for it, and you’ll have fewer things to sort through next time you move. -J

Posted by  |  April 16, 2012 | Categories: Getting Ready, Home | Tags: , , | 1 Comment

Race Recap: 2012 Great Bay Half Marathon

Although the majority of our miles this year will take place via plane, train, or automobile, at least 1,500 of them will take place via sneaker.  M plans to run at least 1,000 miles, and J plans to be right behind him at 600 or so on the year.  We are off to a good start, having logged nearly 300 and 200 miles respectively.  26.2 of those occurred on Saturday, when we both ran the 13.1-mile Great Bay Half Marathon.  Here’s J’s Race Recap: 2012 Great Bay Half Marathon.

Posted by  |  April 9, 2012 | Categories: Running | Tags: , | Leave a comment

Hurry Up and Wait

“Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must undergo the fatigue of supporting it.”

– Thomas Paine

Freedom from a mortgage and a job might not be what Paine had in mind, but the spirit of his statement fits!  First things first, we are sorry for our silence this week.  Who would have thought that being home would be more hectic than being on the road?!  We received an offer on our house the day we returned home from our trip, and we’ve spent the past week setting the wheels in motion to move into a much funkier and more economical river-view apartment that better suits our lifestyle.  So we spent most of our time this week organizing and resolving the things within our control, and now we wait for the rest of the pieces to fall into place.

Unfortunately, we’re not very good at a waiting, even after a lifetime of practice.  When you’re a kid, it’s waiting for your birthday or waiting for Christmas or waiting for your friend to come over.  Then it’s waiting to get your license, waiting to go to college, waiting to graduate.  Once you start working, it’s waiting for the weekend, waiting for vacation, waiting for the next job or promotion.  Waiting can take over your life.  This realization brings to mind the quote most often attributed to John Lennon (though said by others before him): “Life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans.”

There is some truth in that statement, but is it all just waiting?  What about preparation and effort to ready oneself for what’s next?  Is preparation the same as waiting?  The answer, of course, is no.  Preparation involves taking an active role in the future and showing initiative, while waiting implies a being passive while other things occur around you.  We’ve arrived at this juncture in our lives through preparation.  We’ve done our best—sometimes failing and sometimes succeeding—to control the things we could and to mitigate risk from circumstances outside of our control.

And now, we wait.  Better yet, we wait and we live our lives!  This is a time to be active.  To put worries to the side and run races, write poems, visit friends and family, and enjoy each other’s company (and of course, update our blog!).  And as we wait for items outside of our control to be resolved, we can take comfort in the fact that we have prepared the best we could.

We stumbled across the quote below from a great adventurer and wanted to share it as an encouraging piece of wisdom that sums up the impact of preparation and initiative:

“Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now.”

– William Hutchinson Murray, The Scottish Himalayan Expedition (1951)

Posted by  |  April 6, 2012 | Categories: Getting Ready, Home, Lodging, Writing | Tags: , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Virtual Views of the Great Smokies

These first two weeks on the road were intended, in part, to be a dry run for our longer journey this summer.  A short trip provided us with a chance to figure out what worked, what didn’t, and what we would do differently (or the same) when we’re gone for a longer period of time.  One of the things we’re experimenting with is our use of technology on the road–things like which blogging platforms, internet connections, laptops, phones, and cameras work best for us.  Included in the camera category is video…whether shooting video of our travels is feasible, and more importantly, whether it is interesting–both to us and to you.

For this trip, we used the basic movie setting on a non-HD, point-and-shoot camera.  The plan was to include videos as part of our daily blog posts, but we found that our internet connections on the road (which were inconsistent at best, even with a mobile hotspot…) rarely provided the bandwidth we needed to upload them.  We muscled our way through two painfully slow coffee shop uploads before waiting until we returned home to upload the rest.  We’re rethinking our strategy for the next trip, but while we do that, you might be interested in this virtual hiking tour of the Great Smoky Mountain N.P…

Posted by  |  March 31, 2012 | Categories: Gear, Hiking, National Parks | Tags: , , , , , | Leave a comment

Home Sweet Home…For Now

After a whirlwind two weeks (and two especially long days of driving), we are back home tonight, looking forward to sleeping in our own bed and having breakfast tomorrow at our favorite cafe.  Two days ago, we left 80-degree sunshine behind in the Florida Keys.  This afternoon, we met friends of ours (in town from California) for drinks in chilly New Hampshire, rolling in to the bar directly from the highway.  In order to make it on time, we logged our longest day of driving to date yesterday–817 miles from Savannah, GA to Yonkers, NY–adding to the trip total of 4,073 miles.  Sal the Subaru was a champ on his first long-haul road trip, averaging more than 25 miles per gallon (fewer in the mountains than in the South).  Our words per gallon fared only slightly better, due largely to the lack of downtime we built into the schedule.  It’s something we plan to include more of in our longer trips later this year, but our priority for this one was simply to get far away from here and physically break away from our prior day-to-day lives.  Now that we’re back, somewhat rested and fully reinvigorated, we have a long list of posts, photos, and videos to write, edit, and upload.  We’ll spend most of April at home, writing, running, and finding a new rhythm.  But before March ends, we have one more adventure planned: to participate in a charity trivia bee tomorrow night.  After several days on island time, it will take a lot of focus and some strong coffee to ensure our brains are up for the challenge.

Posted by  |  March 30, 2012 | Categories: Driving, People | Tags: , | Leave a comment