Living, Laughing, & Loving

This past week I started two new classes, chemical oceanography and conservation in practice. Both of these classes are heavy on the field trip end, which is cool, but means that I will have lot of papers to write up and a lot of time spent towards learning, haha. I have a slight conflict with my timetable because my conservation class and psychology class are literally at the same time on fridays. I'm hoping I'll be able to just skip the rest of my psychology classes and get the slides online, but I'm not sure how that'll turn out. I decided not to take the scotland course because it's 300 pounds and I wouldn't be able to start working at camp as early. I also had a problem come up concerning my trip to Norway. My conservation class has a group presentation on the day I was supposed to fly to Norway. I'm still not too sure what I will do about that...

Besides classes, I climbed this week at the wall and went running quite a bit. I've been super psyched about climbing this whole time, it's such a great sport to see that world with and see how far you can push yourself physically and mentally. It gets all spectrum's. The mountaineering club had a bar crawl where we were roped together and had to go through obstacles around campus that way. It was a lot fun actually, then we went into town to hustle and walked back to campus because the buses stopped running.

I also went up to the Patterdale area with Joe and Nils and did some scrambling. I managed to loose my hat  in the super wind, but here's a video that Joe made from the trip.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UeFL_zptLPo&feature=youtu.be

I've been watching netflix movies, making cookies and playing guitar in the evenings with alecia, monica, and ben on weekdays which has been fun...Besides that I'm starting to get used to "the old" here. Not everything seems to be as wonderful as it was at the beginning, but I think it's important to get over that hump at some point.

On Thursday Alecia and I don't have class, so we managed to get away to Morcambe bay, just a bus ride away. The tide was out when we got there and chased us back into land. We found a little grocery store, Aldi, that was super cheap and got some digestive cookies and good bread for lunch (chocolate on one side).

I just got back from a climbing trip to Anglezarke quarry; here are come pictures : ) We got pretty lost on the way, but still had a great day of climbing despite the navigation problems.

More Interesting Things

As I'm here longer and longer, I feel like there are more and more things I don't want to forget. Here are just a few:

Tea is dinner, and dinner is lunch
"Fair enough"
"Are you okay/alright" instead of how are you
Nutella comes in a glass container
Galaxy chocolate is the best
I've decided I'm just going to be a bum climber my whole life long
My chemical oceanography & practical conservation classes start this week
English men like to walk ladies to their places and are just plane nicer than Americans
There are many different ways to live a life
Antibiotic ointment aka neosporin doesn't exsist
New holds in a bouldering gym can really tear up one's hands
Cutlery is silverware and plates or bowls
Traveling is something I want to do my whole life through
I'm running a half marathon in Scotland on Easter day
What you want now may change in 6 months
Miles, not kilometers are used in England
Aluminum is pronounced Al-U-mIn-um
Australians like red lipstick
Trains are the best way to travel
Friends matter the most

Scotland Hiking-Tyndrum

This past weekend I joined the hiking club on a trip to Tyndrum, Scotland. I had to go into town a couple times that week in order to get warm-clothes items such as waterproof gloves, rain pants, a sleeping bag liner, and boots, but it was well worth it. I packed for the trip as I usually do, right before I need to leave, but it seemed relatively straight forward for what I needed to bring--anything and everything to keep me warm in the rainy season in Scotland and food for the weekend.

I was doing the trip with three Norwegian friends of mine, Monica, Andrea, and Caroline. Immediately the hiking club members seemed rather put off by us because they heard a different language. The whole trip was a little off socially because we were two groups of people who already knew each other, so I guess neither of the groups felt inclined to branch out. I just felt awkward. But the 6 hour mini bus ride was interrupted with a nice stop at a fish and chips (french fry) restaurant on a corner. This is a shop the club always stops at, so the owners knew many of the members. The only thing that was vegetarian was pizza, but luckily another girl was getting one too. I asked her what size to get and she said she got a 12 inch because the crust is rather thin. 12 inches was way too much for me and I felt like a hippo for much of the night.

We made our way up in the loch's of scotland (lakes are only called loch's in scotland) in the dark. I was kind of sad to be traveling at night, but although I couldn't see the area, I was able to sleep and not feel guilty. The Thursday with the climbing club at grad bar wore me out a bit. I could tell we were going along a windy road by a lake for a while, and later during the trip I found that it was Loch Lomond that we were driving alongside the whole while.

We eventually made our way to the campsite, and for advertising "primitive camping" the sites were amazing. We got to the campground around midnight, so it was dark and our number one priority was to set up our tent. The four of us girls were handed a huge orange canvas tent, and we immediately tried to set it up. I knew it was gonna take a bit of time to figure out in the dark because it seemed kind of old school. Luckily drunk hannah helped us set it up, and I think she was glad to do it in the state she was in because she completely took charge and then wouldn't let us help her with hers.

After spending a couple awkward hours of having no one talk to us in the kitchen and kind of sort of figuring out the route for the next day, the Norwegians and I made our way to our tent. Those three cracked me up all weekend. I don't know why, but how they say certain things, and even what they say would always make me laugh. They were great people to be around. The first night wasn't as cold as the second, but it was still cold for a sleeping bag that only goes down to -10 C (14 F).

We got up at 8, with Hannah nicely waking us up, and had planned to be out by 9. We met the others in the kitchen in no time, then were told to go to the mini bus and get ice picks and crampons fit to our boots. I wasn't really expecting anything too intense, but when I was told to get the gear from the mini bus I was psyched. We broke into two groups---guys and girls was what it turned out to be.

My group ended up doing 2 monroe's (what mountains over 1000m are called in scotland). It's really popular to go "monroe bagging". It was nice to be with the girls because they were more welcoming than the guys, but there was still some odd barrier between the English and Norwegian groups. We started going through this valley/bog with no trees and the color brown predominately covering the landscape. It was beautiful. We slowly gained elevation, and soon found ourselves tromping through snow.

We managed to climb our first monroe and didn't even need to bring out the crampons or ice axes. When we got to the top, we looked around and saw what was the next one we were planning to do.

(tallest on the left...I think)

We decided we had enough daylight to do it, and set off to accomplish our task. This one was much more difficult to ascend. We used our ice axes for balance and as an anti-slip device, while we marched up a slope that would be impossible to go straight up without snow and foot-tracks. The views were amazing.

From there we made our way up a ridge, then into a saddle before making our 7 min bag of the "real monroe" because the first one was just a peak...not above 1,000m

We made our way back down and the valley really reminded me of home with the mini inversion and sunset in the background. We made our way back to the van in dark and had a wonderful nights rest with a puffy coat around my toes and another on my body. The next day I stayed in along with some other girls. I was feeling sick with a cold and my shoes were literally holding lake superior and lake veronica.

The Peaks

This weekend I went climbing with the Lancaster University Mountaineering Club again, but this time we spent all weekend out. Friday we drove out about 2 and a half hours to Edele (Idaly!). On the way we stopped and got some beverages, everyone had a laugh since it's illegal for me to buy alcohol at age 20 in the states. As we were getting close my ears popped, and I knew it was going to be a good place. We came down into the valley on a narrow windy road and in the moonlight we could see hills covered in snow.

After wandering around in the mini bus a bit, we found the community center where we were staying. It was really really nice, including a full PA system and lights. That night we made pasta then hung out a bit before getting to bed. We slack lined and did some building bouldering as well. That night was a cold night. Billy and Josh said they were hot before going to bed so turned off the heater. Bad decision, haha.

 

We woke early the next morning, had breakfast, and made our way on out. We went climbing at this huge cliff band on the edge of a valley. It was really pretty, but the antarctic like whether didn't let us get much climbing done. After I seconded supposedly the "best route" with Arran we stood at the top screaming and grunting as our fingers thawed.

After everyone realized how cold it was, we made our way to the bouldering routes. I wish we started out there, but the snow came in as we discovered we made a mistake by starting off with trad.



 We made our way back to our community hall and basically started a circus. Gaz had fire poy and once we got the hang of the tennis ball poy we all got a chance with the real deal. He also had a huge yo yo thing, but I didn't like that one as much. He also breathed fire. We spent a lot of time just sitting on bouldering pads having deep conversations about religion, climbing, americans, and random issues. It was blizzarding, so we also had the first of many snowball fights and some people made a snowman. I snatched a bouldering pad to sleep on and had probably the best night of sleep I've had since I've been here.



The next day Joe was our guide. We went to a different place, but it was even more beautiful. It was a short walk in the snow, but we were just hoping the rock wouldn't be wet everywhere. We lucked out, and after needlessly scrambling down a hallway of rocks the bouldering started. There was one trad route, but it turned out to be more difficult than expected. I spent most of the day wandering up above and coming back to the main climbing area. It's weird being one of the only girls because I'm unable to climb many of the guy climbs, and it's hard to find climbs to do when only one set of eyes is looking.



We drove back to uni that afternoon and instead of watching the Superbowl I did laundry and some enjoyable reading...