Travel
East Coast Adventure '06 - Day 3
On Friday we embarked on the Thingelstad Family Great East Coast Adventure 2006! What is this amazing event you ask? We are going to be away from home for 5 weeks. The first three will be in New Jersey while I work out of our office here, taking advantage of being in the same office as so many others. The last two weeks will be on vacation in North Carolina. Yeah!
Days 1 and 2 of the adventure were travel days. We left Minneapolis on Friday morning around 9:30a and drove, and drove, and drove. We took breaks for Mazie to get out and run around. We camped in a Starbucks in Rockford, Illinois waiting for a monsoon like rain to pass and providing an opportunity for Mazie to let out some energy, and me to get some back (triple espresso!!!). We also had a great Japanese dinner in Rockford. However, we didn’t take into account that as soon as Mazie saw the food on the grill getting cooked that she would want to eat. Squaking was moderately high. We spent the night just outside of Toledo, OH in a splendid Holiday Inn Express.
We arrived to our great little apartment here in Lawrenceville, NJ last night after another long day of driving through Ohio and Pennsylvania. At one point while driving through Ohio in the morning Tammy looked over at me and said the best line of the whole drive
I’m going to sleep. Try not to do anything stupid.
I appreciated her vote of confidence and continued to motor along while her and Mazie got some rest.
We spent Sunday here in NJ getting the apartment setup and preparing for the week. Stay tuned for more updates from the Great Adventure.
Go to day: 3, 4, 8, 10, 12, 15, 16, 17, 22, 23, 24, 27, 28, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 37 or East Coast Adventure collection.
Vacation Recap
It’s a week later and we finally finished putting up everything from our trip. It takes a while to sort through over 2,200 pictures!
We were thinking of having some family over to go through some of our selected shots but decided against that in favor of putting up our photos with worthwhile captions of what you are looking at. You can make us feel good for spending the time to write all those captions by clicking through the pictures individually. They are divided into pictures from the Tour de France, shots in Paris and last from the hiking trip (Tammy wrote the captions for the hiking trip as her form of a ‘blog’ of that part of our trip).
I also got the data downloaded from my GPS and put up maps of each day of our hikes. I put them inline in the blog posts so you can see where we were hiking on the map.
The photo albums for our Europe 2004 trip referenced here are no longer online, and sadly the database that hosted them is lost so I cannot restore the curated captions that Tammy added to various photos. ☹️
Scuol to Guarda
First of all, let me wish my sister Alona a Happy Birthday! I was on the other side of the world and was unable to get in touch. Hope this is some small consolation for that. 🙂
Today’s Stats:
Moving Time: 5h 25m
Distance: 12.99 miles
Ascent: 2,250’
Max Elevation: 7,365’
Today was the first day of our hiking trip! We just finished dinner with the group at the Hotel Meisser in Guarda. It was a buffet style dinner which suited me fine since I was starving after a long day on the trail. As I told Tammy, I was “deeply hungry”. The sensation is similar to when I finish a century ride. I’m not completely sure how to explain it.
The hiking today was sensational. We left from the front of the Hotel Guardaval and hiked to a gondola in Scuol. We took the gondola up 800 meters to start the hike. This hike is in the easiest category that Ryder Walker does, which doesn’t mean it’s a walk in the park.
The scenery was simply amazing. Every bend in the trail made me think “wow”. Tammy summed it up best, and as only she can with a simple “I love it!” repeated several times. Apparently it kept reminding her of the movie Heidi. I haven’t seen this masterpiece so I cannot comment. It was hard not to stop every few steps to take yet another picture.
We had a great picnic lunch mid-day and spent the entire day on the trail. We left at 8:50 am and arrived at 4:45 pm.
We have also been lucky to be in Switzerland on one of their big national holidays. Today is Dependence Day in Switzerland (also called National Day). Not independence, but dependence. It is the celebration of when the major kingdoms of Switzerland came together and recognized their “dependence” on each other. One of the strong traditions of this holiday however is an amazingly independent tradition where people climb up in the mountains all over and light huge bonfires. On our hike today we saw some of these ready for the evening. After dinner tonight we looked at the ridge line and there were over 10 huge fires visible. How very cool. All of the cities shoot of fireworks as well. It’s a big celebration.
I ate a ton at dinner, need to rest the feet to complete the readiness for tomorrow. I made it through today with no blisters or anything. Tammy wasn’t so lucky, she’s got a quarter sized blister on her heel, no good. She’s talking about hiking in her Keen hiking sandals tomorrow, and I’m sure she will. I’ll be in my boots thank you. We are going to be tackling a shorter route tomorrow, only 7 miles, however with more climbing involved.
Tammy is in the middle of repacking suitcases right now. Remember that I mentioned we have too much luggage? We are solving that problem and shipping two of our bags via train to the Zurich airport where we can pick them up before boarding our flight home. Yeah!
Part of Europe 2004 collection. Also see Hiking Scuol to Guarda from Switzerland & Italy 2023 collection.