Brian & Bridgid

We’ve been cragging the last two days. On Thursday we went to Knob Hill and yesterday we went to Church Bowl. I’m keeping a list of most of the climbs that we’ve done on Mountain Project. The slick, polished rock and tendency for wide cracks and awkward flares has created a steep learning curve for us but we’re getting more confident by the day.

Luckily, there’s no shortage of routes to practice on and the setting is inspirational. On Thursday evening we went for a jog on the trails through the forests and meadows between our camp site and El Cap Meadows. The granite walls, including El Cap, were glowing orange in the setting sun. We also crossed paths with a black bear that took off running when we ran by.

Weather permitting, tomorrow we’re going to the base of El Cap to explore and climb some notoriously slick cracks.

We left Seattle on Sunday afternoon for our big climbing road trip that will hopefully take us through the Southwest and beyond. We got a later than planned start due to the fact that we spent Saturday visiting with friends instead of packing, and we ended up driving through the night. We arrived at Camp 4 in time to line up for the first-come, first-serve camping and we secured a spot for the first week. Unfortunately, space can only be reserved for 7 days at a time so we will need to repeat this process weekly.

We slept during the middle of the day and were surprised to find that we were well rested enough to walk over to Swan Slab for some chill cragging that afternoon. Then we got to bed in time in time for an early start the next day.

Yesterday, we woke up to the alarm at 6:30am to climb the Royal Arches. There were clouds in the sky and the forecast said 20% chance of showers but we climbed anyways. Although technically easy with a rating of 5.7, this 1,600 foot route was a good introduction to Yosemite and tested our endurance, efficiency, route finding skills, and our ability to deal with commitment since the only easy way off is up. Also, there is a pendulum midway up the route where one needs needs to grab a fixed rope and swing across a smooth face to a flake. Needless to say, this made Bridgid a little nervous as I had been when I first did this route a few years back. But of course she cruised it in good style.

The climbing is mostly easy scrambling of mediocre quality, but there are several nice cracks mixed in. We tried to move quickly, especially when the wind started howling and rain drops sprinkled. A convenient bolted rappel route heads straight down from the last belay at top of the route. The rappels are are down a clean face that is clear of rope snagging obstacles and is much better than the dangerous gully thrashing alternative. But 14 raps was still quite tedious despite our attempts at efficiency.

The only photos that we got were near the bottom of the rapple route since we were trying to outrun the rain. Who'd have guessed that it would get sunny right after we started heading down.

For those interested, here is a photo showing the route. Last night we slept 14 hours and today we are taking a rest day in the swanky Ahwahnee hotel, where comfy chairs and free wifi await guests and uninvited climbers.

On September 7-19 we went on a road trip through the Sierras with my mom. In addition to being a great opportunity to spend time with my mom, we also got to see lots of out of the way sights that Bridgid and I may not have taken the time to drive to otherwise. Click here to view the complete album of photos from this trip.

After a layover in a campground near Mt. Shasta, we started the trip in Yosemite Valley where we were lucky enough to get a few nights of camping right in the valley at short notice (usually these sites are booked months in advance). We hiked to Vernal Falls, saw the sunset light up Half Dome, watched climbers on El Capitan, and were accosted by aggressive rodents in camp. And Bridgid and I got in a few climbs in the evenings after the heat died down.

The road connecting the valley to highway 120, which was closed due to the wildfire, reopened just in time for us to head towards the east side of the Sierras via Tuolumne Meadows. We saw some interesting geology at Devil’s Postpile near the Mammoth ski resort. Then we enjoyed some good food in Bishop before heading to the ancient Bristlecone Pine forest.

Descending from Moro Rock in Sequoia National Park

The southernmost destination of the trip was the Needles, near Kernville. The remote, high-altitude granite spires were amazing and I’d like to return someday to climb when the weather is warmer and we are more confident on the long, splitter cracks. After getting rained out at the Needles, we head towards Sequoia National Park. This was our last stop before heading back home, with another stop in Yosemite Valley and a layover in Redwood National Park on the California coast.

Brian and I are heading down to California today. Brian’s mom is joining us for a two week road trip. We’re starting in Yosemite, and are thinking of visiting Sequoia National Park (Big Trees!), Needles, Redwood National Park, and anything else that sounds good along the way.

We’ll be back in Seattle in 2-3 weeks, and we will keep you posted along the way.

We’ve uploaded some photos from this summer. You can go to photos.brianandbridgid.com.

Bridgid enjoying the slabs of Squamish

Enjoy!

Now that we are rid of all South American bugs, viruses, and parasites (knock on wood), Brian and I have been spending half of our time climbing, and the other half of our time visiting with friends and family in Seattle.

Although a wonderfully romantic idea, we decided not to buy the 1981 Honda Civic. Instead, we went to the opposite end of the spectrum (no, not a Hummer), and bought a new Hyundai Accent. If you ask (or even if you don’t) Brian or I will be happy to regale you with our car shopping adventures. The best part is that the adventures are over, and now we have a relatively efficient car, we didn’t spend too much ($10,500), and we won’t have to buy another one for many, many years.

Once we bought the car, we zoomed up to Squamish to climb. Two months of relative inactivity (plus sickness) left us out of shape, and it’s been a challenge getting our endurance, strength, and general fitness back. Lucky for us, Squamish is a great place to regain fitness – there are tons of moderate climbs to do, lots of long routes, and hiking trails for ‘rest’ days (the library is better for the real rest days). It’s been fun, and now we are both feeling ready to try something new…

Which brings me to our ideas for the next year or so. Once the weather starts tending towards rain in the Pacific Northwest, we are thinking of following the sun, and the climbing areas, down into the Southwest. There are so many climbing areas in the US, and we’ve both only climbed in a handful. We’re thinking of Indian Creek (UT), Yosemite (CA), Joshua Tree (CA), Red Rocks (NV), and anything else that comes up along the way.

We’ll keep our blog up-to-date with trip reports, news, and links to photos.

As many of you already know, we’ve returned to Seattle. We bought some surprisingly affordable one-way tickets from a local travel agency in Buenos Aires and we landed in Seattle on July 2. Buenos Aires bid me farewell by infecting me with the worst flu I’ve ever had. Fortunately, I’m feeling much better now.

To make a long story short, we just weren’t finding happiness living, studying, or traveling in South America. Rather than continue burning time and money trying to be less miserable in South America, we came home where we know we can be happy. Now the plan is to go on a climbing trip, interspersed with visits with friends and family around the country.

We purchased Brian R’s 1982 Civic Wagon and we’re going to head to Squamish this weekend, weather permitting. We’re going to cross our fingers and hope it survives some trips around the Pacific Northwest this summer, but we may choose to buy a more reliable vehicle before the weather goes bad and we migrate south to the deserts of Nevada, California, Utah, and Arizona in the fall.

We’ll be in Seattle often this summer so hopefully we’ll find plenty of time to hang out with everyone.

To an outside observer, the confused Bridgid and Brian journey of attempted self-discovery probably appears pretty strange. First, we told you that over the course of two days we hashed a scheme to bail out of Peru and bus across the continent to study Spanish in Buenos Aires. Now I am about to tell you that we have hashed a new scheme to ditch our Spanish classes and bus to a place where they don’t even speak Spanish.

When we were in Lima after Bridgid’s illness, we were both extremely unhappy and were actually considering calling the trip off and heading home to climb. We came to Buenos Aires to find relief from the discomforts and dangers that we were struggling with. In that sense, our move was a success and for the first time since leaving home I feel that we are on solid ground.

When we hopped on the bus towards Buenos Aires, I had fully realized that having two winters in a row would be difficult for me as would living in a big city far from the nearest mountains. But the winter here has been rougher than I had expected and it seems that nearly everybody in the city is sick. I’m getting over a week long cold/flu and I find myself a continent away from all of my friends and family (other than Bridgid) feeling cold, sick, and bored and asking myself what the hell I’m doing here. The answer was, “to finish the Spanish course,” but that doesn’t make sense now that I don’t even want to stay in Latin America beyond our Patagonia trip this southern summer. So we started discussing a change of plans.

So where are we going? While sitting in bed sipping tea, sneezing, and trying not to drip snot on the Lonely Planet book that I was flipping through, I found my eyes moving north on the map from Buenos Aires to warmer places. It turns out that Rio de Janeiro, Brazil is a surreal rock climbing tropical paradise (check out these photos). And despite the impression that I got from watching City of God (an amazing film that I would highly recommend), it sounds as though it’s no more dangerous than any other large South American city with an extreme division of wealth. I imagine that it will be a lot like Lima in that sense: if we use common sense and stay in the right places at the right times we be most likely be alright.

So now the plan is to make arrangements for the bus, store most of our stuff (including the computer) with Mary and Julian, and leave (maybe this weekend?). Brazil (and especially Rio) will be hard on the budget so we will work hard to keep things cheap without sacrificing the experience or safety. If the city is too much for us we’ll bail to smaller towns or national parks. In the meantime, we’re not sure whether we are going to class this week. Lots of people are sick and the last thing I want is to pick up another illness when my immune system is weak.

From the beginning of this trip, we’ve both had a strong inclination to find a place to stay settled instead of bouncing from place to place. It has felt great to get settled in Buenos Aires and we are comfortable here, although we don’t feel passionate about staying here more than a couple of months. In this post I’m going to write about some things that we enjoy that have become part of our everyday life.

Café scene

There are countless cafés in Buenos Aires. It seems you can’t walk more than a block without passing a café. They come in all shapes and sizes from bare bones diner style, to charming but basic, to ultra swanky. Most are good and amazing coffee and baked goods for cheap prices are the norm. More importantly, lots of cafés have an excellent vibe. They are great places to hang out and chat, study, or work.

A popular breakfast deal that is offered is a café con leche with 2 or 3 medialunas (croissants) for 5-7 pesos. A café con leche translates to coffee with milk, but it is more like a latte with steamed milk. We’ve spent many mornings relaxing in a café before class studying, although we’re starting to spend more time at home eating healthier and cheaper breakfasts.

Delicious food…and some healthy food too

It’s not hard to find amazing food here and in general it is cheaper than food of equivalent quality in Peru. You can’t go wrong here with pizza, pasta, and empanandas. Every restaurant sells these and the quality ranges from okay to the best I’ve ever had. There are two fresh pasta stores within 2 blocks of our apartment and both sell amazing pasta (raviolis cost 8-10 pesos for a box that feeds 2 people). The pasta stores also sell fresh sauces and shredded parmesan for very reasonable prices.

Bakeries are almost as common as cafés and we have a favorite a couple of blocks from our place. We often buy cold empanadas that we heat up to accompany a slightly more healthy dish. Bridgid’s favorite is onion and cheese and my favorite is Roquefort. Baked empanadas are more common than fried here, although both are available.

We eat lots of mandarins and pears from fruit markets, although the pears seem to be getting funky recently. Also popular is a chopped veggie medley (which usually includes some butternut squash) that we put in stir-fry and of course garlic and onions.

There’s an awesome natural food market where we buy dried beans, whole grain rice, granola, spices, and fresh honey at excellent prices. This is excellent for both our budget and our health.

Exercising in the park

Getting outside and exercising is important to us. Although we are feeling a little cooped up in the big city, the amazing parks are keeping us sane. We live within 15 minutes of Reserva Ecológica Costanera Sur (map), which is a lot like Discovery Park in Seattle in terms of size and quality of trails. And there are some great parks and playgrounds on the way for stretching and exercising. The only thing that is missing are good hills for running.

There are also some nice parks in Palermo, but they aren’t nearly as nice for running as the reserva.

Our home

A random shot in San Telmo, our hood

Being on the road really makes one appreciate having a home. Mary and Julian have a mildly neurotic housekeeping style that ranges from OCD clean-freak in certain ways (on Mondays we need to both sweep and vacuum our room; never just one) to slightly unsanitary in other ways (like the super nasty silverware drying rack in the otherwise quite clean kitchen). But for the most part it is very nice and I have appreciated my first barefoot showers since leaving the US.

They also have the nicest hot water heater that I’ve experienced since leaving the US. Although it’s continuous flow (no tank), it consistently produces perfect showers. Also most toilets down here cannot handle TP and you have to place your used TP in a bin next to the toilet (kinda gross). Luckily, we have a high power toilet that can handle TP (again, the first time we’ve had this luxury since leaving the US).

And most importantly, it’s secure and we trust everyone there. Unfortunately, we’ve been having some roommate issues with Mary and Julian recently. Julian annoyed me from the start but he’s been offending and annoying Bridgid more and more. We’re going to consider a new place for July, but I think we’ll probably stay.

Exploring the city

View from Puerto Madero on the walk from our place to the reserva

Compared to most of our classmates who seem to have huge adventures every weekend, we explore relatively little. We’re enjoying holing up in cafés and studying or working on projects, eating, or wandering around our hood. But we have gotten around a little. We’ve explored the Centro around our school, headed out to Palermo a couple of times, and walked through La Boca (a working class neighborhood with some random touristy bits mixed in).

So far, we like our hood the best. Palermo is nice but extremely yuppie and everything costs more. The rock gym, Rustik, is about as far from being our scene as is possible in a rock gym. It’s tiny size combined with insane crowds prompted people climbing over, under, and on top of (I’m not joking) other climbers. And the scene was very Palermo, with fashion appearing to be as important as the climbing. When I kick the cold that I’ve had for a few days we hope to head to the nearby city of La Plata to visit the gym Rocodromo.

The little things

We headed to the local video rental place last night and rented a DVD for the first time. It was great watching a movie and they had a great selection of both international films and funky, Argentinian films. We saw Sofacama, a funky indie film set in Buenos Aires.

The movie was okay, but the more interesting part for me was seeing all of the little things that are starting to become so familiar to us: from the way people look and dress, the accent, the places, the taxis, the continuous mate consumption, the way people throw junk they don’t want in a pile on the sidewalk and wait for scavengers to pick through it, etc.

I’m learning all sorts of interesting things in Buenos Aires.

The Spanish lessons are going very well. Four days a week, Brian and I head downtown to the University of Buenos Aires. I read about UBA in a fellow traveler’s Lonely Planet-Argentina book (thanks Tarija!), and then checked it out on-line, and really liked it. Most of the websites for language courses in Buenos Aires are geared towards students and tourists; they seem focus on chatting people up and having fun. Which is great, but not when you’re paying $1000 a month. At about ARG$1250, or US$338 for a two month course (2 hours per class, 4 days a week) – the UBA courses are nearly 1/3 of the price of most other courses in BA. The building is run-down (which the Lonely Planet book mentions), but it only makes the experience more interesting!

Speaking of interesting…the class is taught in entirely in Spanish, as that is the common language among the German, Turkish, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and American students. Most of the other students seem to be around our age – maybe early twenties to late twenties, with one woman in her early fifties. Speaking with people with varying accents has helped me improve my understanding and speaking immensely.

Our new home has been quite a learning experience as well.

The couple we are living with is in their sixties, and they rent out two other rooms in the house to a couple of Argentinian guys. We share the kitchen and living room with the couple, and have a large room. It is a huge improvement on the hostels – they keep the place very clean, and like chatting with us. The chatting is great, and is really helping me speak better. Most of the words and phrases I’m learning have to do with the kitchen, but Mary is also very keen on improving my education using telenovelas.

The novelas in Argentina are an entirely different from what I saw in Costa Rica. They are on all day, every day, but the story lines seem closer to my experience with prime time shows in the US. Mary has her favorites, and she really likes it when we watch them with her. Here is a link to a commercial for one of them, called Valientes. The song gets stuck in my head all of the time. Brian has a harder time ‘understanding’ the novelas, but we both think that they are a great way to learn new words (lover, ex-husband, liar, pregnancy test…just to name a few).

The rest of our lessons in Buenos Aires have happened on the Subway (Subte), the streets, in coffee shops, parks, and restaurants.

The last lessons have not been as fun as the others.

During our first week here, we celebrated the wonderful world of public transit – the Subte! – by taking the subway to class every day. It felt so cool being a part of the crowds of people getting to work or school using such an efficient form of transit. And it is very cheap (about US$.30 per ride). Our subte honeymoon ended when Brian got pickpocketed by a smooth little old lady. We are very careful on the subway, but she was very quick, and very sweet looking. While smiling at us, she bumped into Brian a couple of times, and managed to get his wallet. He’s usually very careful, so we were both impressed by the level of skill she had.

Then, the other day, I put the laptop next to me to write something in my notebook. Someone came up to ask us for directions (us? the super-gringo couple?), and while we looked at him, another guy reached from behind me and snagged the laptop.

Brian figured it out about a minute later, but the guys were already gone.

I was pretty bummed about the laptop. It’s what I use to write, and, since Brian has been working a lot, I used the little laptop to check emails and update the blog too. Also, I felt really, really stupid. Although the laptop was only 2 inches from my hand, I knew better than that. (I’m still kicking myself!)

So! There have been some fun lessons, and some hard ones, but it has been interesting!