THE HIGH ROAD
I changed my mind on this one.
I was going to write this blog post about what it means to be a good travel partner.
To me, it's about friction, or lack there of it. Going with the flow, as they say. The less friction, the better the travel partner.
That’s my aunt in the photo above. She’s a good travel partner. She’s always ready for the next adventure. She goes with the flow.
I joked with friends and family while I was in Italy that there was a woman in my travel group that was going to make several appearances in that blog post, but as a frequent example of what not to do. She was all friction. At every stop, every turn, first thing in the morning, last thing at night. All day. Friction.
Hell, now that I think about it, I was going to dedicate the whole post to Deb. We'll call her Deb, because, well, that's her name. She deserves no anonymity.
Deb tested my patience. A lot.
“She’s bound to run amok, invested enough in it, anyhow”
She was so unbelievable that I actually took notes. I don’t mean mental ones. I was so shocked and appalled by some of the things she did that I literally started jotting them down in my phone. Why?
There were simply too many too remember.
The blog was going to be incredible.
The conclusion of the post, after I gave several stunning examples of arrogance, ignorance and narcissism, was going to be that the toughest part of the trip was 'taking the high road' with her.
It wasn’t learning the language, which took hours of practice every day for months. Not the actual legwork, which included climbing literal mountains, over and over again. It wasn’t the time-zone change, the jetlag, the culture shock. It was being the bigger person. Biting my tongue. Keeping my cool, around God damn Deb from Sarasota.
“The high road is hard to find.”
It's been a few weeks since the trip now. I didn’t want to rush anything. I needed to decompress. To process, to re-acclimate, to unwind. I even went home for a few days. It was really nice. And what do you know? The further I got from the experience, the less I thought about Deb.
I realized that if I wrote that blog (which I did, in my head) then I wasn't really taking the high road after all. Holding my tongue at the time was only half the battle. The other half? Forgetting about her altogether.
To actually ‘take the high road’ would be not to write about her at all. To not tell you the insane stories, to not repeat some of the unbelievable quotes, to not let her live on in infamy.
She’s not worth it.
Let it go. Take the high road.
Three pretty good travel partners. Not pictured: two bad ones.
So that’s it. That’s what I’ll do.
As I recap the trip I'll try focus on some of the other challenges - real challenges - like attempting to learn Italian and preparing for a four-star hike while living a foot above sea level. The preparation, the goals, the experience. Not Deb.
OK so what’s with the black and white?
Well, aside from the obvious Ansel Adams nod and the fact that I just thought it looked cool, I also thought it would be funny to switch to color after changing the mood and direction of the blog post itself.
There’s a popular meme on social media of two characters riding in a bus, one looks miserably out the left window at a colorless rock wall, the other enthusiastically smiles as he enjoys the view out of the window on the right, a gorgeous valley that resembles some of the photos below.
By deciding not to write that original blog post, I’m choosing to look out the window on the right.
Binoculars up, smile on my face. Let there be color.
“Far; a long, long way to run”
This set of photos is from the first actual hike of the week. It started with a couple cable-car rides, each of which soared over the valleys of the Italian Alps and allowed me to shoot some dream photos. We had to get up and over a mountain to get to our starting point, and that seemingly took us from the Sound of Music to the moon.
This is what that ride looked like.
The shot below is something I’ve had in my head for a long time - I actually mentioned it to my aunt while we were in Iceland two years ago. There is something about the sun shining down on a tiny, flat farmland at the bottom of a the Alps that drives me insane. I love it. I would travel the world to find it, and I did.
An absolute dream shot. The inspiration for the trip was to see and shoot something like this. And it happened on day 2.
Starting the hike with the two cable-car rides landed us mid-mountain, which meant there's no foothills, no warmup. Nowhere to go but up, right away.
The difficulty and slope of the mountain to begin this hike, along with an early hardware malfunction (one of my poles fell apart about seven steps in, my first time using poles) combined with the terrifying sight of a falling rock - nature's runaway train - made me wonder, nearly out loud:
Am I ready for this?
Looks like a fine place to start a hike.
It turns out I was, at least for this much of it. It was a challenging few hours to the top, but a short hike in relation to the rest of the week. I found my groove and lead the way. The crisp mountain air felt good in my lungs. My feet felt at home in doubled-up Nike socks and hiking boots. My camera was strapped to my chest with a full battery. This is what I came here for!
We took some time at the top to catch our breath and take in the view, which in turn just took our breath away again.
After soaking up the sights and scarfing down some preservative-free granola bars, it was 90 minutes downhill to the next resting point. That's the thing about mountains! If you climb up one, you usually have to climb back down (although I did see a few rescue helicopters up by Matterhorn, not a cheap ride home).
Going down is much easier on your muscles but harder on your joints, and the loose gravel added an additional challenge at times. Good thing I stopped a lot for pictures.
We stopped for lunch at a man-made lake that was a shocking shade of blue. If I had to describe it… well I wouldn’t. I simply couldn’t do it justice. So I let my camera try instead.
Decent spot for a sandwhich.
We took our time on the way down. It was a warm-up day, per say. We had a beautiful afternoon to get to our destination with time and gravity on our side.
What awaited us? A small hut on the mountainside, shown in the photo below. It was there where we would rest up for our ‘big day’, the long hike from Italy to Switzerland the next morning.
That night we gathered after dinner to plan the big hike out, and our guide put the fear of God in us:
“Monday you can do whatever, Wednesday, Thursday too. Friday, whatever.
Tuesday? I need hikers.”
Read about how the long one went here [link coming soon]