Traveling Thoughts

There are few things that have the ability to make me tingle.  Walking into REI and being emersed in the expansiveness of adventures waiting to happen; now that is one of the few things that makes me tingle.  While walking in makes me tingle, walking out has the potential to be fatal to the bank account.  For this reason, I don’t do it often, go to REI that is.  The past couple months however, I’ve been fortunate enough to frequent REI at least once a month.  I don’t ever go in just for the heck of it, I always go in with a purpose for fear of spending too much money.  Dispite this, haphazard spending occurs; walking into REI is a recipe for deviation from any plan in which you walk into the store with.  Tonight, for some unknown random reason, rogue behavior with the visa didn’t occur; and yet, I still left the store satisfied.

Tonights recipe for tingly satisfaction, a trip to the Thule/Yakima car rack section.  The price of my soon to be new bike rack system will send anyone into shock.  The thought of having it just makes me tingle.

I even got to bring the fun home with me.  I brought home a Yakima catalog, would’ve grabbed a Thule one as well but they were out.  The Yakima one has proven fun though.  All kinds of interesting stuff at the end of each section.  There was even a generator to make a 17 syllable haiku.  Here’s mine:

I was in the zone
I loves me the hardcore stuff
Hope to be here again soon

When the Nintendo DS came out I thought it was stupid.  I was uninterested in it because the choice of games sucked!  Two days ago, I found out that the the next Zelda for the portable system was coming out on the DS.  Where did that put me, in the need for having a Nintendo DS.  Luckily for me, there was a new unit out, not as nearly as big and bulky as the original DS, but now nice and compact and the choices of games had improved.  So here I am today.  I now have a Nintendo DS.  I had to wait patiently for it too.  None of the stores had the new DS Lite in stock.  So, I stalked all the stores today, found out when they’d be arriving, called to have one put on hold for me once it came in, and went and got it after work. 

It’s kindof sweet, the whole dual screen thing.  It’s pretty cool.

I cannot express the general vexation caused by the ignorance of pedestrians.  Or perhaps I give them too much credit in calling it ignorance, it’s more like selfishness; selfishness surrounding the biking/running/walking trail.  It’s paved and you could drive one car down it, then it turns into a normal sidewalk.  When it’s as wide as all get out, they pick a side.  When it thins out and they need to pick a side, they choose the middle.  It’s extremely difficult to dodge the pedestrian when if you go left you’ll hit the rocks, fall into the street, get run over by a speeding car…you get the point…go right and your head will be removed by the by the outstretched limb of a tree.  The bike will continue towards the ever impeding wall.  And then there’s the route I chose.  Before I can even take the slight bend in the road to choose to go left or to go right in an attempt to avoid the oncoming asshole, I go straight (totally unintentionally), hit the curb and see my tire explode as I fly over the handlebars.  If this had been a car wreck, the imbecile driving down the middle of the road would have gotten a ticket, and their insurance would have to pay for some of the damage, if not all of it.  Instead, the imbecile that caused my wreck smirked and snorted at me.  I got to carry my bike a mile back home and get a new tire.  This time, I crashed.  Next time, someone’s getting run over.

I love to camp, but it’s been a while since I’ve done so.  However, I did get the opportunity to go camping in Moab, Utah over the July 4th weekend, but I wouldn’t call it real camping so much as I’d call it Resort-ful camping.  There was a pool, showers, real flushing toilets.  But I was in a tent, on a mat, with my much unneeded sleeping bag.  You could feel the heat rising from the ground at night.  But it was beautiful.  If the night sky wasn’t covered with clouds, there were so many stars.  It was an awsome view of the night sky.  You could sleep with the windows of the tent open, because at night the coolest it got was like 70 degrees.  Even though that’s still hot by my standards it’s better than the 100 degrees that it was during the hottest part of the day.

So, you’re probably wondering about the title, adventuresome girl, because resort-ful camping doesn’t exactly count as an adventure now does it.  The excitement of the trip was the mountain biking.  I did the practice loop on the slickrock trail, in the middle of the day, that was killer.  I don’t have my own pictures because I couldn’t stop to take any, I had to keep going so that I’d make sure that I wasn’t going to die if I stopped.  But, you can follow this here link :: http://www.utahmountainbiking.com/trails/slickrck.htm to view pictures and read a little about the trail.

I also did the Bar M loop.  Which I am proud to say I got lost on.  Well, not lost exactly, I took what I thought was a shortcut, which turned out to be a dead end, and getting back to the beginning of the loop via my little short cut probably took me longer than if I had stayed on the trail.  Go figure.  You can view that trail and pictures here :: http://www.utahmountainbiking.com/trails/bar-M-loop.htm

In two separate rides I covered most of the Old Moab Highway.  It’s an 16 mi round trip, I did 6-8 of it round trip.  The first night I was in Moab (Friday) I went up it probably 1.5 - 2 miles before I had to come back down because I had no clue where it went.  The day we left (Monday) I went 1.5 - 2 miles down it before I figured out what it was and decided I had better go back up it because if I made it all the way down the mountain I wasn’t going to be able to get all the way back up it.  That was an adventure.  There’s no pictures of it. 

I took a hike up what I think is the Green River.  I was supposed to get to a waterfall.  But after 2 hrs of hiking up river, in the river (for fear of poison ivy) I didn’t get to the falls.  The trip back down river took all of like 15 minutes, because I went down the trail.  I didn’t know that poison ivy had berries on it, but I do now.  Here’s a pic of the falls if you’d like to see :: http://utahpictures.com/images/Moab2/smPowerDAM132.jpg

The final adventurous thing to speak of was the hike to delicate arch.  You increase a 400 ft elevation in a quarter of a mile.  It was a long hike, mostly because of the climbing.  But it was really only 3 miles out and back.  I don’t have my own pictures of it yet, but you’re welcome to read about it here :: http://www.climb-utah.com/Moab/delicate.htm

So, I think that this little excursion makes me adventuresome, if not, there will be more fun little trips with side adventures to be taken here in the near future.