brian stole everything i wanted to write about, so i have to improvise.

we’re home, sitting at the dining room table with our laptops open. the kids are upstairs probably reacquainting themselves with their bionicles. oh how they missed their toys! it is a scene much like the night and morning before we left on this road trip, has it already been 22 days ago? at the end of each trip, and i probably harp on this when i come home and write something about it, i fall into a post-trip despondency: did it even actually happen? it’s all just memory now. some pictures will give me a jog. but did we really go? how annoying it is, being tied to time. the present is where all the action is, but it’s over in a split-second, relegated to the past what was once so much anticipation of the future.

i was ready to come home this year. roughing made us into whimps i told brian earlier today, or was it last night when as we lay down in a motel-room bed for the second night in a row.  we did really well with the roughing it for ten days, then we made the mistake of motel-ing it and showering, and then we could barely make it through another three days of climbing before we succumbed to it again. our friends paul and april put us to shame, they with their five-week-old baby. they camped the whole time! granted, we were at maple longer than them, but still. had they been there to witness our weakness, i’m sure they would have cajoled and mocked us and probably withheld an evening shot of tequila.

so anyway, i was ready to come home, but then we had to get home. and as brian said, it seemed to take forever. and by the time we got close to denver, it wasn’t any fun anymore. there was traffic. then it rained a lot and we almost got blown off the road. then it was….. well, kansas. i think the problem with kansas is that there are no cities to break the state up into doable chunks. you get topeka 3/4 of the way through (if you’re coming from the west), which doesn’t amount to any really exciting city-driving, and then kansas city, right at the border. yawn. it was particularly hard to get through this year. and i usually like driving through kansas, as i was raised in a town in western kansas. whenever someone talks about how they hate driving through kansas, i pipe in with, “i grew up in kansas,” which usually spices up the conversation. anyway, this year, i couldn’t agree more with those people. i don’t know what the difference between our other road trips and this year. i usually don’t want to come home at all, and that makes for a hard ride home too. but i still liked to be out on the road, looking around, driving, etc. i’m probably just getting old.

so my last thoughts on our maple canyon trip really do mirror brian’s. what fun it was to climb there! i could get on just about any 5.12, and do it. quickly. no projecting, just sending. giant hand holds every where, giant foot holds everywhere, and pulling on them hard. i don’t know if we’ll go back, maybe someday, because i also agree with brian’s opinion that bouldering trips are way more exciting. i wonder what we’ll do next year…

Posted on June 17th, 2012