Started the day watching some pals play tennis to wrap up one of the many league seasons.
Grabbed a couple of hours at the pool on a surprising (and welcome!) warm afternoon.
And wrapped with a decent sunset.
And that’s really, really the end of summer.
It can make it complicated for the other drivers, but it put me in a great mood.
Today’s tennis was downtown on the Arthur Ashe Jr. Courts at Battery Park, named so because that is where the multiple Grand Slam Champion learned to play. It’s a cool piece of tennis history and the courts were surprisingly nice, given that they’re public and in the city. You can never tell what kind of love they’re going to get in the annual budget, but these were in great shape.
We played well and won 6-4, 6-2. I’ve really enjoyed the combo matches this year. There’s only one more week of matches, but we’re still in the hunt for a playoff spot.
Zone 2 life suits me. It’s a workout, for sure, but I don’t feel completely wrung out at the end.
Overcast Labor Day Saturday is a quiet one at the pool.
I’m okay with it.
(thx, Ronan)
I like playing in the 5.5 combo league, where 3.0 and 2.5 players play together. The 2.5 guys are all pretty chill, and they’re new to tennis. There’s no pressure to be on and the matches can be a place to work on different parts of my game.
I didn’t know the zones were in all of the Fitness entries. I guess I really am a Zone 3 man.
I’ve been playing tennis for a few years now, almost exclusively for fun and exercise. It’s been a good sweat and I like hanging out with my tennis friends. I’ve also gotten better at it.
I’ve gotten to a point now, sadly, that my skill has exceeded my fitness, and if I want to keep improving I’m going to need to start exercising and improving my cardio so I can get better at the thing I do for exercise.
I know, I don’t like it either, but here we are.
I have chosen a twice-weekly spin class as the path by which I will collect cardio gains. I used to be an avid recreational cyclist and I’m not unfamiliar with the dark arts of the spin studio. Plus they’re free at the club so the barrier to entry is low.
I never thought of myself as a Zone 3 Man, but the data is the data.
More work miles here. I was sure the novelty of Virginia greenery would start to wear off by now, but it hasn’t happened yet. I do love a scenic overlook.
As fate and fortune would have it, the office I visited was just down the road from the county fairgrounds and the fair was in town. I mean, we had lunch options, but we’d have been fools to go anywhere but the fair.
1/4 fried chicken and a Dr. Wham? Yeah, 1/4 fried chicken and a Dr. Wham.
The fair at lunch doesn’t run the rides, but they’re all ready to go. We also missed the monster truck show the night before, and we were going to miss the tractor pull and demolition derby later in the week (but I did get to meet the guy who hauls the demolition derby’d cars off of the track). I’m just glad those things are happening somewhere.
There were also cows.
I wasn’t in Montana long enough to adjust to the time zone, so I got up early on my last day to catch a hike before I flew home. I am not normally a hiker, but when the trails are right there, a person doesn’t have a choice. I even packed hiking boots.
The Drinking Horse Mountain Trail, built in 2001, is a 2.5-mile hike with 700 feet of elevation. The internet described it as “Easy to Moderate” and “Good for Children”. I figured I chill 90-minute loop would be the best way to wrap my time out west.
Getting places before sunrise is easy when you’re surrounded by mountains.
Even though the trail was a loop, I took a picture of the map just in case. I didn’t need it, but it gave me something to pretend to look at while I was catching my breath.
As I worked my way up the trail, there were plenty of benches to grab photos (and gasp for air. so much gasping). The sun slowly worked it’s way up the valley as I went along. You can see it getting brighter in these photos.
At the top, with the sun over head, you could see everything. It was awesome.
I was gassed. “At least the rest of it is downhill”, I said.
There were a couple of places where you could see a small path off of main trail, where maybe people were adding small spurs to get to photo ops. This one was obviously a path to that treacherous-looking rock formation on the left. The park added the barrier to give folks an extra minute to consider their common sense, I suppose. I didn’t need the extra time.
It is difficult to describe just how steep these switchbacks were. I hope this photo does it justice. There weren’t many on the way down, but it was like this the whole way up. “Easy to Moderate” my ass.
The descent was otherwise a delight. I can’t help but reiterate what a beautiful part of the country this is. Back at the bottom of the trail, having survived the experience, I took a minute to enjoy some of scenes.
I didn’t notice this sign on the way in. It all worked out, though.
And with the hiking done, I rolled out to the airport and home.
The Bozeman airport is really something. I’d go so far as to call it “pleasant”. They really lean into the dinosaur fossils here, but I didn’t have time to get to the big museum with the skeletons. Next time.
Day two in Montana got off to a promising start because a cold front had blown through overnight. The wind and light rain cleared all of the smoke and overcast blegh, so the Big Sky show was in full effect. The day’s schedule consisted solely of an excursion south into Yellowstone National Park. I wanted to see as many of the Park’s wild animals as I could, and it was slow going.
This chipmunk was as good as it got, at first. I don’t know if the smoke from earlier in the week had the animals in hiding, but we didn’t see much for the first hour or two. It didn’t really matter since the scenery was as advertised and a complete stunner at every turn.
I was tickled by the way fishermen would just pull off the road and walk down to the river to get after it. Like, no parking lots or anything. If you’ve got a license to fish (and you better have one because the park rangers don’t play with that shit), you’re free to go.
We stopped to take in some of the majesty at an overlook that featured this waterfall.
And if you are going to have wooden rails to keep people from falling, you’re going to get the good pocketknife graffiti.
We eventually saw just about every animal I’d hoped for.
Bison:
Magpies:
Elk:
What they call “tourons“:
We also saw some packrats, prairie dogs, ducks (we have those here, though, so not so impressive), a gopher, and a mountain goat, but I didn’t get photos of those.
I just couldn’t get over how crazy it was to have mountains everywhere. It’s a beautiful place.
They also get dozens of feet of snow in the winter, so there’s no chance in hell I’d live there.
I forgot to mention these swanky cowboy boots I got in Abingdon. I’ve never owned a pair, so when I had a chance to get an appointment at LaGrange Leather, I had to take it. It was fun trying on some wild exotic stuff, but in the end I went with a regular cowhide.
I do enjoy a fun shoe. Breaking these in might be the end of me.