27 September 2006

active weekend

it took four days before i could walk normally again after last weekend! sure, everyone in the office was either laughing at me or giving me funny looks, but i love the feeling of being totally worn out.

on saturday i fulfilled my longtime wish of visiting the italian part of switzerland, ticino. a few of us did a bike ride from bellinzona, ticino's capital and a cute little town that was my favorite part of the trip, to locarno, a lake-side resort town where we picked a restaurant that left us with the impression that ticinese food is more swiss than italian. (boo) ticino is a little too far away for just a day trip, but you know me.

on sunday, a coworker organized a klettersteig trip. you wear a harness and attach yourself to a cable running up and down some steep crag, and the farthest you can fall is the length of cable between points where it's bolted down - about 4 meters at most. i loved the going up part - the height was scary but thrilling, and it wasn't like anything i'd done before! but the down part totally killed me to the point where my legs were getting quite wobbly, and even when the klettersteig part ended i had to walk downhill so slowly that we missed the last chair lift down... so had to hike another hour and a half down the mountain... at the end, i kept saying how happy i was to be sitting down again, and everyone thought i didn't like the trip much since my best memory was of it ending. but i'll definitely go again! i hear there's one where you climb up and there's a friendly cable car at the top waiting to take you down...

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Kwakster,
It sure looks like you're having a ton of fun in that picture. I climbed Half Dome in Yosemite this summer and I walked quite awkwardly for the next two days, just like you. :) Teaching high school has actually been really good. 11th grade - modern U.S. history, 12th grade - human rights. Yeah, who on Earth gets to learn about human rights during high school?! Cal and I are thinking of backpacking in Europe for a month next summer. Will you be around?! :P