Monday Morning Musings

Posted on January 14, 2019 under Monday Morning Musings with no comments yet

“Sitting on the dock of the bay, wastin’ time.”

 

Most people who do any amount of traveling use a checklist to make sure that they don’t leave something important behind, like a curling iron. The most important thing one needs when venturing outside the borders of their countries is a passport and in many countries, you also need a valid visa. If you happened to read my most recent book about my time in India, you’ll know what I’m talking about.

Most of my trips are pretty routine so the checklist is short and packing is minimal.

I have never done a long walk before. Yes, I have run several marathons but I haven’t done a sustained month long trek across a country. Such will be the case if I tackle the El Camino in Spain later this spring. I have been getting several tips from my brother who did this walk last May. Obviously, one must travel light so everything has to fit into one compact backpack. This includes walking poles.

My brother had already agreed to loan me his backpack so when he made the offer of collapsible poles, I happily agreed. Have you ever used walking poles? Neither have I so I decided to take them for a test walk the other day to Robinson’s Outdoor Store to have them properly fitted. I click clacked my way from Oak Bay to downtown Victoria. Apparently these poles are important for stability, especially for going uphill and downhill. I have been going downhill for some time now and might add walking poles as permanent aides.

Over my lifetime, I have taken part in numerous public events. I have been an emcee, a performer and a spectator. One of my pet peeves is attending a public event to discover that the people running it haven’t double and triple checked the technology to make certain that it was in good working order. For me, faulty microphones or PowerPoint presentations that fail to show up on a screen are borderline inexcusable.

Back to the poles. At Robinson’s store, they have a demonstration area to show neophytes like me how to assemble a backpack and understand the nuances of walking poles. I laid the two poles on a table while Erin, one of the owners of the store, deftly took the poles, collapsed them and reassembled them in a matter of seconds. I grabbed the second pole. It looked easy but my legendary ineptness and two cups of coffee less than an hour before had me fidgeting to the point of sweating and swearing. Collapsing the poles was easy. I’m a pro at breaking things down and destroying them. When it came time to turn them back into a walking pole, I couldn’t get the very last piece to click into place. I tugged and pulled, first gently (as suggested by one of Erin’s fellow workers who had become a spectator) and then with brute force. No luck.

I handed the pole back to Erin and then to her colleague. Neither of them was able to get the disenchanted pole to cooperate. While I wiped perspiration from my brow, the offending pole was taken out back to another employee. It was concluded that the pole was faulty and would need to be replaced.

I had this mental image of arriving in southern France in the shadow of the Pyrenees (one of the starting points of the walk) ready to tackle the Camino only to discover that a critical piece of equipment was malfunctioning. I could see me pole vaulting the offending object off of the mountainside and impaling myself with the good one.

I was handed a brand new pole and within seconds I was brandishing it around like I was Zorro.

I exited the store and was waltzing down the sidewalk when I passed over a grate and the tip of  one of the poles momentarily got stuck. A woman was passing by and commented that this often happens with her high heel shoes. I said that I have the same problem. She did a double take and then guffawed heartily.

Two quick food tidbits. I was out visiting some friends the other day at their house. We had a fantastic lunch which included great coffee and stollen. Stollen is a German fruit bread of nuts, spiced and dried fruit coated with powdered sugar or icing sugar. My friend’s husband is gluten intolerant. He decided that he just had to have a slice of the delicious bread and within minutes he had a coughing fit. One might say that he was a gluten for punishment. (Insert groan)

Most of my siblings (including me) have a notorious sweet tooth. A few nights ago, my brother, feeling a bit peckish, raided the freezer late in the evening, He confessed to eating five cookies. I commented on our morning walk the next day that he showed amazing restraint stopping at only five cookies. His answer was telling. “There were only five cookies in the container.”

Have a great week.

P.S. I have a favour to ask. If you read my latest book and liked it, would you consider going to the Amazon site and doing a short review? Thanks. https://www.amazon.ca/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=chaos+and+wonder%3Asix+months+in+India