Sanity check

Camping costs less than meds

Last weekend I intimidated convinced the boss to allow me a few days off, loaded up the truck and the Significant Other, and headed off to St. Stephens for the first time in a year and a half. This was a weekend for kayaking, hiking, bleeding off months of work-imposed stress, and a chance to scope out riding trails for Stephanie and her horse.

A brief aside: I've bitten off a little more than I can chew with this girl. An accomplished rider who has been on horseback since she was five, a scotch connoisseur, and a fellow blues lover, Stephanie has successfully kept me in check and relatively sane for the last couple of months.

Stephanie and her mare Sheebah:

Once we got our days off, we loaded up my piece-of-shit truck and pointed it north. It was a beautiful day for the drive up:

This being LA (Lower Alabama), back roads mean passing a large number of abandoned, swaybacked houses that landowners are too lazy to bulldoze. Fertile ground for meth labs and all other sorts of inbred hill-scoggin stupidity.

I fell in love with St. Stephens in winter. In spring it gets better, but the mosquitoes and ticks are beginning to reappear.

This was a decent kayaking trip. The lake up there only covers 100 acres, but you can paddle laps in it and get an excellent workout. Stephanie, in spite of her claustrophobia, took to it really well:






The third day out there dawned cool with a thick fog. It was 5:30 AM but I was up in an instant, eager to head down to the water and get the kayak in. This is how you start a morning:









As the fog burned off severe weather threatened, so we packed it in and headed back, regretting every mile back on the odometer.