Old Dogs Don't Want to Learn New Tricks
06.12.2018 - 06.18.2018
View
2018
on mrb430's travel map.
After 2 1/2 months on the road and 9,000 miles, we've come to some realizations about ourselves. In hind sight, as always, they seem too obvious to even write down but maybe you'll be as amused as I am that it took us this long to accept what we all know about Scott and I.
We Do Not Like the Cold
We have now reached Canada and as I write this I am in leggings, a long sleeved under shirt, a wool sweater, wool socks, and my GoreTex jacket. Scott has on jeans, wool socks and hiking boots, a long sleeved shirt, heavy fleece jacket, and a down vest. It's June 18th people!
We keep asking ourselves - well, how did we get here?! The answer, of course, is we planned a trip to the Northwest and while intellectually we knew we were headed to colder climes, and we packed accordingly (thank goodness), neither of us really acknowledged it. I can't tell you how many times Scott has said, "I know I packed it but I never actually thought I'd have to wear it"!
The scenery is breathtaking.
We're glad to have made the trek up here to see all of this but we aren't staying. After we meet the girls in Banff, we're going South! We've rearranged our trip to hit Colorado next and forego Washington State until later.
National Parks are for Tourists
Strictly speaking, we are, of course, tourists. But we aren't on a two week whirlwind tour of the Parks so we don't need it spoon fed to us. The National Park roads have their place. They're easy and they have convenient pullouts at the beauty spots. But they lack spontaneity and make sight seeing feel somewhat obligatory. I mean they made that pullout just for us how can we not stop at it (along with every other tourist on the road)?
We definitely prefer to make our own way and stumble on beauty spots and stop if we want to take them in. That's how we found spots like these.
Hiking is Hard Work
Now I know what you're saying. If we'd get out of Ruby and go for a hike in the National Parks, we'd enjoy it more. Two problems with that. 1) Cadeau isn't allowed out of the parking lots and 2) we don't really like hiking. When we embarked on this trip, I thought - oh, we'll start hiking, we'll be outdoors people, we'll get active and get tons of exercise! And here we encounter why I named this blog post what I did. We like the pace of our lives and really aren't inclined to change it. Given the choice of sitting at a cafe or bar and looking at the mountains or going out and huffing and puffing up a trail into them, the choice for us is obvious. Now mind you, we like walking and walking in the woods counts. But there's a difference between walking and hiking!
Mornings Are the Best Time to Get Out and Get Active - NOT!
Which leads us to the next obvious observation. As I've mentioned before, in the afternoons the clouds often build on the mountains and can result in a rain shower and a cloudy afternoon. So, you might say, you need to get up and out early to enjoy the day before that happens. Right you are. Except we like to wake up late. We like to sit over coffee for hours. Getting moving before noon is pushing it most days. I think the most wonderful thing about retirement is banning the words "should" and "ought" from our vocabulary and replacing them with "want" and "like". As in "we should go drive the Going to the Sun road" becomes "I'd like to go see if we can find that lake". And we did.
Besides, sunset at 11:00 PM is not conducive to "Early to Bed, Early to Rise". This was the view from our house at 11:00 one night.
And this was a sunset walk in the woods at 9:45.
So to summarize, we are basically fundamentally lazy. We like sleeping in, chilling out, off-road adventures, and staying off the beaten path, unless it's a nice walk around a lake or through he woods. And, we want to be warm again. Hot would be okay, too!
Don't forget to subscribe to the blog for updates and check us out on Instagram @arrradventures.
Posted by mrb430 09:37 Archived in USA Tagged montana Comments (0)