THIS ONE'S A DOOZY.

THIS HIKE WAS THE BEST. WOW.  Monadnock is an awesome climb.

Keeping in the spirit of #tbt....For the first hike of the season this year we went on probably the best hike I've done in New England and one of the best I can remember doing. Living in Boston, or really anywhere in New England, is great because we're within a reasonable driving distance of a zillion mountains. (That's basically what got me thinking I could write about this for a decent amount of time in the first place - between the hikes we've already done and the innumerable amount of hikes we have left to do, there's stories aplenty and plenty to come.) Monadnock was Julie's idea (check out her awesome blog!), but she thought of it in the spring before we all scattered for summer break. So coming back, we decided to take it on! The view from the top looked incredible, so we did some research, got a crew together, and headed out.

Monadnock summit from the road

First off I'd like to point out that Monadnock is WAY taller than it looks from the base. Its 2149' feet to the summit, and it took us a few hours get to the top - though we did stop to take in the views every few minutes. There's a couple main trails  - the White Cross and the White Dot - but we decided to take a combination of the smaller trails to challenge ourselves and to avoid running into a bunch of people. (Just for the record, we took the Lost Farm trail to the Cliff walk and bald rock to the amphitheater trail to the Smith summit trail, and it was intense and beautiful). Monadnock is pretty popular, and there were a good number of families and other groups hiking the two main trails. Even on the smaller footpaths we ended up running into

a lot of people on our way up. The trails are steep and rocky at times, but there are plenty of places to stop and "look at the view" to give yourself a breather. Though the park people may not thank me for saying this, I really recommend getting off the trail a bit to get the full effect of just how awesome the views are all the way up the mountain. We did, and it definitely added to the perfection of the whole experience. We even sang some Pocahontas tunes off the side of the mountain at one point, and got some love from other hikers on their way down.

                 
As we got higher, hikers coming down started telling us to watch out for the "gale" at the top. When we started, it was literally the perfect day to hike. The sun was shining and it was around 60-70 degrees, so it wasn't too hot and wasn't too cold. The later it got, the cloudier it started to get. We made it to Bald Rock, which was probably about an hour from the summit, and the sky was completely grey. The closer we got to the top, the more we started catching on to just how intense this gale everyone was warning us about actually was ...

Slamherst

Miles and I decided to spend our two and half year anniversary in Amherst, MA. We like to go driving - if you can't tell that yet - especially now that fall is in full swing, and a cute day trip out to a quieter town than Boston seemed like the perfect way to spend the day. (I also pushed pretty hard for it as I'm an Emily Dickinson fan, and she lived in Amherst her whole life). Little did we know it happened to be a "halfway to St. Patrick's Day"celebration, which we didn't find out until we had already gotten there - and from a pretty funny source. We tried local beer, explored the Farmers' Market, and drove around the surrounding fields and woods to get a good enough dose of nature.

We had intended to maybe go to a winery outside of Amherst or maybe on a hike, but we left a bit late to hike and once we got to Amherst and parked, we ended up just walking around downtown and eventually getting food at a local bar called The High Horse, which brewed its own beer. The beers were pretty good! The food photographed a bit better than it tasted, but I did still eat all of it so I can't say I didn't enjoy it! I got their IPA and Miles got a Belgian Wheat Beer called Mr. White. All and all they were good! I'm crazy for hops so I would have loved more, but it was fun to drink the local juice!

Probably the funniest and least expected thing about our excursion to Amherst was that it happened to be halfway to St. Patricks Day which, for UMass kids, is a cause for celebration. Tons of people were lining up outside and pouring out of bars downtown dressed in full St. Patricks day regalia. I wish I had gotten a picture, but you can imagine the atmosphere. It was pretty funny and I wouldn't have had a problem except that I had been dying to go to Antonio's since we had decided to come to Amherst, as I'd seen it was the best pizza in the area and I love pizza, but it was SO FULL of a combination of drunk college kids from the bars and families coming from the cute outdoor farmers market a block or two away. The combination of so many of the two in such close quarters was a bit much so we ended up at High Horse, which worked out anyway! If this little trip taught us anything, it was how to make the most of curve balls and still have a chill day when the destination is completely different than we expected.

All in all I'd say Amherst is a fun way to spend a day in New England, especially in fall, but the town itself wasn't what I expected. Chalk that up to my own ignorance though, before deciding I wanted to go there the only thing I knew about Amherst was that Emily Dickinson's house was there. Sometimes I just get these ideas and get REALLY excited about them without really thinking it through or even investigating that much. Had I realized there would be a halfway to St. Patty's day celebration, that it was like that, I definitely would have approached the whole thing with a different mindset and come with my drinking cap on. Still, everywhere surrounding Amherst is gorgeous, and its worth the drive out just for that. If you're looking for a good time surrounded by 18-24 year olds, and some families and young professionals scattered here and there, it's a fun place to stop through. Who can dislike a place that doesn't just celebrate St. Patrick's Day, but the half-way mark too? As a former Irish Dancer, I can respect that.

Em+

leaf peeping

Yeah I'm serious!


New England has some of the most most vibrant leaves I've ever seen this time of year. A few weeks ago I was looking online for somewhere to hike in the Berkshires, when I stumbled across "leaf peeping", which it turns out is a thing in up here. So, naturally, I didn't want to miss out and ended up convincing Miles to drive all the way out to the western-most county in Mass. The best time to go is really the first or second week in October, so we were a bit late to see the leaves in their peak. Still, it was impressive. 

so the idea is this...

Last year, at the end of September, my friends (Miles, Alyssa, Mike) and I went to Walden Pond. I had been talking and talking about a bunch of us going out into New England to hike or camp, but we never actually made the move.

Finally, after two years of going to school in Boston and a year of having easy access to a car, we managed to pull ourselves together and drive out what ended up only being about half an hour to Walden. (This seemed the obvious first choice since its such a famous spot, and we had all read the book in high school, so, why not?) Lyss and I were both really looking forward to this because there isn't as much "free-range" nature in Boston, for lack of better phrasing. There's plenty of gardens and parks - some of which can almost make you forget you're in the middle of the city. But it had been a while since we'd gotten out of the city. The boys brought a football and I brought a disposable, and we went for a walk around Walden.

First stop was a small beach, where we waited for Miles to pee, because Miles always has to pee. Mike sat on the sand while Alyssa and I tested the water, which was unsurprisingly freezing. I was the only one who ended up getting in, but I grew up in Nashville, Tennessee where nature was never hard to come by - drive an hour in almost any direction away from downtown and you've been in the country for a while- and I was determined to take full advantage of the abundance of nature I wad suddenly surrounded by - even the very, very cold pond water.

But this was so easy...all we had to do was not do too much the night before, wake up early, get coffee, drive for half an hour, and we found ourselves stumbling across a neat pile of stones in Thoreau's backyard. And...Free. Zen. I don't think we even had to pay to park.



As we were trying to follow the "Heart Healthy Trail", I'm pretty sure we only made it about halfway before veering off and getting lost. This ended up working out though, as we happened to veer off towards the site of Thoreau's Cabin. There, I read two things that stuck with me. The first was big and right at the head of the path up to the cabin site. It's one of the most iconic quotes from the book:

"I went into the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to confront only the essential facts of life. And see if I could not learn what it had to teach and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." 

This stuck out for a few reasons. First, it reminded me of a project I had to do in eleventh grade. It was our "Thoreau Project", and the idea was to choose a way we would "live deliberately". I decided to walk to school for a few days, which was about three miles and took about an hour. An odd choice, but I remember wanting to make a conscious decision to do something that I wouldn't do otherwise. When was I ever going to decide to wake up an hour earlier to walk my ass to school for an hour with my backpack and books? And that was my three days of deliberate living, and when I really confronted the essential facts of jay-walking, and learned what life had to teach me about appreciating how many other ways we have to get places in the morning besides walking.

The V.

The second thought this quote conjured was that I had been doing the exact opposite of living deliberately since I moved to Boston. I'd gotten stuck in that V between the Red line and the Green Line, and I was letting my time in one of the most beautiful, explorable places in the US go to waste. I could have made moves, but there was always some reason I didn't. Back home we explore the city get out into nature a good bit, but everyone has cars and it's the summertime (In the winter we live deliberately around various fire pits and in various living rooms, going through the Panera drive thru and not having to get out of the car to get mac and cheese).
Boston is surrounded by forests and state parks and mountain ranges that, in that moment, I was furious I hadn't already explored more of. If made the deliberate decision to walk to school at 6:30am which meant I had to wake up BEFORE six in the morning, why not take a drive with my friends with a few more hours to sleep in and a destination I was actually excited about?
What I needed to do was to stop letting everything that comes with living my life in Boston be an excuse to not make the most of living in Boston; to find a way to shake off whatever angst or seasonal depression that comes along and focus on the essential facts of life, and learn whatever I can from living it.
Then I caught sight of a two word phrase carved into the placard for Thoreau's Cabin:

"Simply Simplify"

And that so succinctly stated exactly the thought I was trying to form in such a perfect, cosmic way I took the hint, and it has stuck with me since then.

We finished the hike just as the sun set, and it was a very poetic finish. We tossed the football a bit, admired the sky and I geeked over some ducks (I'm a fan, ducks are hugely overrated). And we made the half hour drive back to our bubble in Boston.

Since then, I'd like to think I've actually managed to change the attitudes that were preventing me from living "deliberately". I've made a point to get out into New England and even just out into the city of Boston, but over time the idea spread into aspects of my life I wasn't even thinking of when I saw my little catch phrase at Thoreau's Cabin.

This whole long spiel (they won't all be this long I imagine) has been aimed at laying out what I'm choosing to write about and why it matters to me. This will be a compilation of my various attempts to live deliberately and "simply". I can't exactly do what Thoreau did and live-in-a-cabin live "simply", but the idea is to try to go out get as much as I can out of it life by not letting negativity cloud what's important...as I prepare to graduate from college and am forced to become a real person. There it is.

Conclusions are my biggest weakness, so I'll finish out with a quote that I think applies from probably the most positive human force on the planet, Lil B:

Shouts out to everybody that's here for learning and love and trying to find their way. I mean, shit. I mean, shoot. We're all trying to find our way.

Em+