Nay, we are but men. Rock!

Here I am sitting in my house three days before I was scheduled to be home from my backpacking trip.  I checked the calendar before I left and sure enough it said August.  I checked the map and sure enough I was heading to central Oregon.  Then why in the name of everything that is holy did the weather act like something out of a Charlton Heston movie?  When we got to the trailhead it was sunny and about 104 degrees, typical for the geography and time of year.  That night the wind moved in, 30-35 mph gusts.  The next night the lightning moved in to go along with my friend Mr. Wind.  The night after that Rain Jr decided to show up to the party.  And last night Rain Jr’s father Papa Downpour decided to dance on the face of my shelter with his friend Cyclone Jim.  I mean there were torrential downpours and wind gusts upwards of 45 mph or more.  Last night was probably the most miserable night I have ever spent in the wilderness.  I was laying in my rain-soaked down sleeping bag looking up at the bottom of the tarp and just waiting for it to give way and fly off into the night leaving us even more unprotected.  Somehow our knots held and the shelter construction held pretty well through the night; I only had to get out and tie down the tarps two or three times throughout the night.  And did I forget to mention I FORGOT MY RAIN GEAR!!!!!!!!!  This was my fourth time taking college students into the wilderness for a week and never before had I ever encountered even a drop of rain.  Last night sucked.

Other than the weather that was more unpredictable than Cher on her wedding night the trip was pretty good.  The students I had were great and rose to almost any occasion  with high spirits.  They worked together and surpassed my expectations.  They were encouraging and supportive of one another.  They never questioned my decisions.  In short they were pretty awesome.  But the weather blew.  While on the trip I had to keep my tongue and watch what I said in order to set the right kind of example.  I needed to keep morale at a high level.  Now I could care less.  I want to vent.  I want to complain.  I think I am done.  Thank you for listening, or would it be reading?

Every year as part of my job I lead a team of 10 college student leaders on a 7 day backpacking trip in the Sisters Wilderness in Oregon.  It is one of the best parts of my job description.  I really love the day to day work that I do with these leaders but to actually get to go into the back country for a week and get paid for it is pretty cool.  Our program has built into it 4 main elements used in the learning/development process: Solo, where they are on their own for about 24 hours, Leader of the Day, where two of the leaders are responsible for all of the decisions made for the day from traveling to setting up camp to meal schedule, Final Expedition, where the guide and I leave during the night and they are responsible for getting safely to the trailhead, and Summit, where, you guessed it, we give summating one of the Sisters a whirl.

All in all it is a pretty sweet deal.  I get to be part of breaking in some students who have never been in the wilderness before and be part of furthering their leadership skills on the whole.  What I don’t like about it is the masochistic training schedule our university’s strength and conditioning coach put together for us.  I swear this cat must be endorsed by the National Association for Lunging Lungers.  Every day has you doing 764 more lunges than the previous day.  I don’t know what’s worse, doing the lunges now or summating a 10,000ft mountain without doing them.  Personally I am leaning toward not doing them since it is only one day of the trip instead of every day leading up to it.  On the bright side though my tush now deserves to be cast in bronze and put in the Louvre. 

I am in Dublin (California, not Ireland) for work.  We’re implementing new software at work, and I’m here for training on one of my portions of the software.  During my travel today I’ve realized some things about who I am, neither good nor bad.

My first real job right out of college had the opportunity for extended travel.  Something like spending a few months at a location building and configuring a network.  I was single, and the money would have been good, but the economy turned sour and I lost my job before I had a chance to do this.  Since I never got to travel for that job, I didn’t really get to find if I enjoyed it or not.  I liked the idea of it, though.

The job I used to do full-time (now half-time) had me going to Boise 2-4 times a year.  Typically for 2-day, 1-night stints.  And I’d typically go over with Brendon (and others), so I wasn’t required to get outside of my introverted shell to have social interaction.  The last time I made that trip was now 14 months ago; that seems kinda odd, but that’s what my Outlook calendar says.

Maybe it’s the fact that I now have two kids at home that makes this a little bittersweet (I can hear my wife asking if I’m crazy).  Maybe it’s that I’m used to traveling with someone else, and not flying solo.

I’ve been on the ground in California for only 5 hours now, so I probably need to relax a bit.  I’m sure once the class starts tomorrow things will be better.  I’m just glad that I do this infrequently, because I don’t know if I could handle being on the road by myself a lot.  Even though my kids drive me crazy sometimes, they are my kids, and I miss being around them (again with my wife asking if I’m crazy).  I also wish I would have had the forethought to fly my wife down here for the weekend, and we could just cruise around the Bay Area for a couple of days together.  I’ll have to remember that for next time.