A Philly Break

A few weeks ago I decided to go back to Philadelphia to attend my friend Laura Kicey's photo gallery opening show at Gravy Studio, called Lost and Found (if you are local, check it out! - ongoing until April 30). Initially I wanted to drive there and surprise her as I did a few years back for another one of her shows, but I changed my mind and I ended up flying to Philly the night before the show. This little fella and I were on a mission, to spend some quality time with talented friends and forget about stress and work for a weekend.

On Friday, after a scrumptious breakfast, courtesy of Miss Kicey, we got ourselves ready to partaaay and went downtown for a long stroll through the city before heading to the gallery.

Ended up doing a walk a bit shorter than 5k, but quite impressive when you actually look at the map. We covered some distance, yo! We also stopped for coffee in Chinatown and had, for the first time ever, the Cadillac of coffees, Blue Mountain coffee from Jamaica, prepared in a siphon, which was quite the contraption. I only put in some milk, it didn't even need sugar, and I'm the one who cannot drink any coffee without 5 spoons of sugar in it. This coffee was not bitter at all, had such a velvety taste, very unique and purely wonderful. Have one at Ray's Cafe if you ever find yourself in town.

The evening was as much packed with people and socializing as I could expect it, but I was glad that we managed to go to bed before 2am since I was due to run 10k the next morning. The weather was going to be very clement with a bright sunshine and a 16 degrees Celsius that day. I put on my capris and a long sleeve tshirt and off I went to discover the neighbourhood on the go. Told Laura that I should be gone for about 1h and that she could follow me on Runkeeper if needed. I honestly had no plan, I was just going to follow the sidewalks. It went like this:

The houses on this street were too sexy for sidewalks

Found runners and a long sidewalk

Ooooh, a school and a paved trail!

Which turned into dirt trail

Lost the sidewalk again, but found the cyclists

The rest of the pictures can be found here. I got a tad lost, or rather, I wanted to find a way back home that didn't look like a main road without sidewalks. But given that it seemed to be the only way back, beside the train tracks, I decided to adventure myself on it and thankfully found another paved trail shortly thereafter. I also found a bunch of cyclists that were looking happy to get to the end of a very steep climb and I gave them a "Way to go, guys!". I told myself that I envied them for riding outside already. I ended up running a bit longer than 10k, but it was a very enjoyable one, plus I crossed paths with dozens of other runners, so I really felt like I was belonging there. I had found my tribe, and that was rather memorable given that I went on those streets totally at random. Hint, always look for the high schools, they have running trails and plenty of people on them.

In the afternoon we went hiking in Ridley Creek State park, where I almost lost an eye. While bushwhacking to reach an abandoned greenhouse, a tree attacked me and lodged a splinter under my left eyeball. My brave friend managed to grab it with her fingernails and not to pass out in the process. (Forever grateful to you, my friend. You did awesome out there!) A few minutes later a thorn got stuck in my nose and I started bleeding. The day was just starting. Hiked for 6k afterwards, including an almost vertical ascent of 200m to retrieve a geocache. It was all worth it, I swear. What don't we do to find tupperware in the woods...

The next day we did it again. I ran 8k in the morning, then we went to visit another beautiful place, this time in Delaware - the Winterthur Museum and Country Estate, complete with guided tour inside the mansion and photo walk through the Enchanted Forest, freshly carpeted with millions of tiny blue and purple flowers for as far as you could see.

All in all, three days spent mostly outside, reconnecting with the beauty of the nature, the fresh air and my camera. A much needed break and what seems to become a yearly ritual for Laura and I. I am so happy for having been able to go on a little paid vacation before losing my job, it made it all so much more bearable. Now I can open my laptop and pop on the screen the photos I took and relive those moments again and again. Blogging about them too, it's great therapy. Until next time...

Our summer fitness adventures

After the triathlon, we went camping, thus I was disconnected from the interwebs to be able to blog. We only made an hour stop by our home so I can shower and change clothes, then we drove straight up to Algonquin where we made a new attempt at living in the wilderness, that is living in a tent for 10 days. Some people told us that was rather hardcore, but we found that the time passed by rather quickly and the return to work was actually more violent. I won't go into details as how the days went by, but I will try to recap our fitness opportunities since that's the theme around here.

Hwy 60 - are we there yet?

I'm surprised that we remembered how to set up this tent

Bed head, coffee, compression socks and sandals.

But when you're in vacation, these are a bit more subtle as I am going to explain. 

Walking:

When you're in a large campground, your first exercise is walking - everywere, but especially to the washrooms. To sum it up, our tent was located 200m away from the washrooms and we counted an average of 5 bathroom trips a day, that's 2km/day... times 10, you do the math. Hurray for pee pee and poo poo to keep us in shape.

Next, trips to the beach, located at 500m from our tent, it provided us with a nice opportunity to bank a km each time we became beach bums. Over 10 days, I estimate those trips to 8.

Walks to the store - we were lucky to have one about 500m away and because we had regular needs for drinking water, ice, bread and ice cream, those trips became quite usual by the second day. Estimated 8 of them as well.

Total walking distance (just around camp) - 36km, two of them were barefoot, just because.

Hiking:

Hiking was our second source of fitness, combined with geocaching, because you have to put some extra motivation in those hikes, you know, dangling a carrot in front of a donkey, that works pretty well. Suited up with backpack, GPS, a good dose of deet, sandwiches and at times, not enough water, we went into the following adventures:

The Lookout 2.5km

Sitting on top of the world

The Secret Lookout 3km

Jungle gym

Centennial Ridges Trail 10km

The Spruce Bog Boardwalk 1.5km

Beaver Pond Trail 2.1km

Total hiking distance - 19.1km

Swimming:

Even since I knew we were going to stay at the Lake of Two Rivers Campground, I gave myself the challenge of finding the geocache placed on a little island in the middle of the lake and what best way of getting to it other than commando, aka swimming. Since I am not such a strong swimmer and the great outdoors still overwhelm me, I chose to do the swim in my wetsuit. People looked at me strange every time I put it on, but hey, I rather be comfortable and relax than drown in front of their eyes.

Commando geocaching

Finding the cache was no problem, quickly signed the log and put back in place. Happy to see an ammo box  as well, that was like the cherry on the cake. Here's me with cache GC82F0. We spent the rest of the day on the island, diving in the lake and fishing, that was an all around awesome day. Since I was still sick though, I decided to go back to the beach in the canoe with hubbs and the boys and postpone the longer swims for later in the week.

Speaking of which, the day before the last, I suited up once again and went for a swim around the island, happy and relaxed. Here is the Runkeeper activity for this epic loop.

Total swim distance: 2.2km

Biking:

We didn't bring our bikes with us, not only because we wanted to rest, but because they are both road bikes and we were mostly interested in doing the Old Railway Bike Trail, which required mountain bikes. So one day we rented mountain bikes for all of us and we went on this adventure without quite knowing what to expect. What we feared the most was BEAR. And we found bear poop right in the middle of the trail, which was as close as we got to meeting a bear. It made the bike ride even more challenging, in which we were all secretly running away from an invisible predator, without saying it out loud for fear of inducing panic in each other. The bike ride was a 12km out and back to the camp along the Lake of Two Rivers and Whitefish Lake. Just at the end of Whitefish Lake there was this bridge from which people were jumping in the lake. We were not prepared for this, but the chance was too good to pass on, so without taking our clothes off, we jumped in as well. Below is a picture of me, soaked wet and proud. The bridge was so hot it was burning my feet, the smile only lasted for a second :-)

Wet and wild

Total biking: 24km

Running:

The second day after we arrived, I was still pumped up after the tri and went on a short 30min trail run with hubbs. Alas we didn't repeat the feat as my cough got worse and worse and it was physically impossible to keep a running pace without coughing my lungs out. I even threw up once because of coughing too hard. Not fun at all. That was a reckon mission on the Old Railway Trail, before our bike ride. Looking back, after finding the bear poo, I am glad that we didn't run again on the same trail, yikes!

Total running: 5km

Kayaking:

Before leaving the camp, we had one last mission, that was to rent kayaks for the boys so they can get in some paddling action of their own. That day the current on the lake was a bit too strong though and my youngest son decided that he had enough after crossing to the island. While he spent the rest of the day diving, I took over the kayak and went in a bit of exploring with my older son and later, hubbs.

This is what my first rowing activity on Runkeeper looked like.

Below are more totals:

Wildlife sightings : moose 2, snake 1, frog 2, turtle 2, bear poo 1
Ice cream: regular scoops 3, soft serve 1
Alcohol consumed: beer 1
Fish caught: 0
Jumps from bridge in water, fully clothed: 2
Hours spent in hospital: 1
Campfires: 0
Marshmallows eaten: 4
Geocaches found: 14
Mosquito bites: 2

This has been by far the best vacation we spent as a family. So much fun, such beautiful scenery that we discovered, breathed, tasted, and touched. The only downside was my illness (which is now officially bronchitis) and the impromptu trip to the hospital that I had to make one night with an UTI. Not sure how we can top it off, we wanted to make another family trip at the end of the year to mark our 15th anniversary but all of a sudden, it feels a bit superfluous.

Until then, there will be work, work and work and another marathon for which the training started... oh wait, yesterday!

How was your vacation, if you had any? What are your autumn goals?