Perpetual Ruminations

Portaging Glendalough

Yesterday we took Max, our Husky, and Bellah, our Australian Shepard, over to Glendalough State Park to do a bit of hiking and to let them run and burn off some energy. We have camped at Glendalough in the past, but it's a cart-in campground. You park your vehicle, unload, and use a provided cart to haul everything to your campsite. No campers (except for the camp host), no electricity, just tents and roughing it.

There are two lakes within the park that are connected by a small river that we explored partly by kayak when we camped there. Now days, tent camping is out; it became too much work to haul everything, set up the tent, and sleeping on the ground is difficult and uncomfortable. But, we do want to explore the park fully since we weren't able to when we camped.

This means we will need to kayak the two lakes and the river connecting them as well as hike some trails that are only accessable by water. They actually have a couple of yurts and a campsite on the backside of Annie Battle Lake that are only accesable by water. But, to kayak that far and back to the landing means I need to work my ass off to get in shape. I haven't kayaked in over a year, I had put on too much weight for my kayak and had finally lost enough to kayak again, but this past spring, summer, and fall were not good for kayaking or much of anything else.

Now, my weight is down even more; I'm close to my ideal wight. But, I'm also very much out of shape. I have the winter months to work on regaining my strength and stamina, and come spring I'll be doing a lot of kayaking and hiking, starting easy and building back up to where I was a couple years ago.