It started out quite innocently. Joyce asked me what I wanted for my birthday. This is an annual exercise for Father’s Day, my birthday, and Christmas. Joyce asks what I want, and I reply, “Nothing.”
You see, I have everything I need. Not a lot of stuff, since what I need is limited. I have my library of books, backpacking and camping gear. I don’t need anything else, and I don’t need any new books or gear. My life is “dialed in.”
As we do at the end of each year, we spent the last two weeks (and New Year’s) of the year camping. Leaving home on Dec 20th the forecast was rain, rain, and more rain (L.A. got over three inches) and desert lows in the 30s. Is this camping weather?
I first noticed my diminished hearing about 10 years ago while training customer facing people. At the time it became a little difficult to hear them talking to customers from my normal distance. As the years went by my hearing got worse. But I was focused on the advantages of not hearing well.
A common ailment for hikers are foot blisters, and I would imagine more backpacking trips are cut short due to blisters than any other cause.
Typically I want to use a product for at least 10 years before recommending it. Leukotape not only meets this standard but it is an amazing product – the best I have ever used for preventing and treating blisters.
According to this article at REI, “Type 2 fun is miserable while it’s happening, but fun in retrospect.”
At the end of October I did a 5-day backpacking trip with my friend Peter Vacco. Unfortunately our 3rd hiking partner, Doug, had to cancel at the last moment to attend to a family matter. He may be glad he had to miss the trip after all, because Day 3 of this trip was definitely Type 2 fun.
Sitting outside waiting for the full moon to rise. I turned on the interior camper lights to take the picture. We normally enjoy sitting outside without any lights or a campfire.
We recently returned from an extended camping trip in the Southern Sierra Nevada. It was our almost annual marriage anniversary camping trip. We have gone camping to celebrate our anniversary every year except twice, when Joyce wanted to go on a cruise instead.
Joyce had never been camping before we met and has become an avid camper. In fact, starting next year (after I finish remodeling the house) she wants to go camping several months each year. If you are a frequent reader of our blog, you know we prefer to camp where there aren’t many people and of course where there is no electricity, cell phone service, Wi-Fi and all the other “amenities” of civilization.
Corky passed away almost a month ago on June 3, 2019, at 12:05am. He was born on August 11, 2003. I have been in kind of a funk for the past couple of months. He really started to decline at the beginning of May. The past month I have been generally unmotivated to complete tasks, especially to work on our house.
I am writing this for me, but you, the reader, are welcome to read along.
There hasn’t been much camping or backpacking this year, nor has there been much activity on this website. That’s because I’ve been stuck in an hourglass, or more precisely, I’ve been trying to dig myself out of debt. Not monetary debt, but trying to overcome a deficit in my time bank. I didn’t do anything wrong, the debt was planned – sort of – and now my time bank account has become overdrawn.
I’ve decided to create a new category for the blog called Senior Moments for backpackers. Anything related to becoming older that impacts, changes, limits, or forces me to make changes as I get older may become something to write about.
Showing off as a youthful 67 year old
2018 is now “in the books.” It’s a new year and I can’t change the past. Many outdoor bloggers summarize the previous year with their favorite gear (an opportunity to insert ads of said gear to generate income) or summarize the highlights of their year. I’ll do neither in this post.
2018 was the year I became a senior citizen. There really isn’t a set age when one becomes a “senior.” For some it is a state of mind and they start acting like old people in their ‘40s or ‘50s. The reality is that at some point in time all of us will be unable to do what we could do in our youth. Walking (my definition of backpacking) is something most of us can do for most of our lives. Last year I turned 68 and on a couple trips with younger people I couldn’t maintain my normal pace. I was fine on fairly level terrain and going down the hills. But on moderately long elevation gains there were times I fell behind my younger walking partners, although I could still keep up with some of them. I also found that during the year I could still keep up with my friends if I trained ahead of time for a hike that entailed lots of elevation gains.
It’s that time of year where we “fall back.” And the news articles explain how we have an extra hour of time and often ask how will we use this extra hour of time that miraculously appeared out of nowhere.
