Kung Fu With a View

Yesterday was another pretty frickin' awesome day. As you may know, I've been doing Kung Fu with a group of music students this year. The group meets once or twice a week. We have our classes on Kits Beach, so we're used to having the ocean and the mountains in our line of sight; on a clear day, it's really inspiring. Anyway, we've been talking about doing a hike sometime so we could do Kung Fu on top of a mountain. Long story short, because one of our friends is moving away, we finally got around to it.

The hike we did was E

agle Bluffs, on the north shore of North Vancouver. I always get confused when I try to describe mountains, but we parked where the Olympics happened on mount Cypress. It was about a 45-minute drive and we left at 9 in the morning.

Despite the early morning aspect, the drive set the tone for a day of wonder and merriment. My bassoonist friend brought a fun little book of Canadian children's songs. I remember using the same series of books in elementary school [sidenote: I'm now on a mission to find some other volumes of these books cause they're so fun!] There were some great songs and we had a repeat of a song we learned the last time I went hiking - Lester the Lobster from P.E.I.. We took turns teaching each other the choruses by rote and then passing the book around for solo verses.

After a quick bathroom break, we started the hike. The first section of the hike was mild-to-moderately horrid. Almost exclusively steep s

witchbacks, and very few flat sections. I don't even like walking up a hill in Vancouver, so an hour of up-walking wasn't exactly putting a smile on my face. Unlike last hike, I never reached a point of feeling like death; I learned my lessons from the previous experience - stay hydrated and don't let your sugars drop.

*DIABETES TANGENT*

Last hike, I cut back my Lantus (background insulin) from 36u to 26u - as a result, my sugars were dropping the entire time. This time I only took 21u and my sugars were much more well behaved. They still dropped, but I had them higher to start - 10.0 mmol. At the first viewpoint, they were at 8 something, the lowest they got was 6 something just before lunch.

I made a big mistake - I assumed my s

ugars would be dropping, so I took less insulin for lunch, and took it later than I should have. When we headed back after lunch, my sugars had shot up to 15 and I felt like death! I corrected and after an hour, they were tolerable, but I won't second guess things next time.

*END TANGENT*

We took regular little breaks to re-hydrate and check sugars/snack. Basically, we reached the destination without incident - everyone was happy and healthy and it was good fun!

So, it's summer, right? We were all wearing summer garb like shorts. It was cooler than we expected, but we kept warm by moving around all the time. The sun was playing catch all day, and when it was sunny, it was very

warm. Despite this - THERE WAS SNOW! We had several little snowball fights as we went along, and it was the responsibility of the people at the back of the pack to try to hit the front runners. By far, the most exciting moment of the hike was this:

The discovery of crazy carpets!

This was after we reached the summit and we used them on the way to the Eagle Bluffs Lookout.

[oh ya, so it's a little confusing, but the main destination is not the summit, rather it's a viewpoint. The summit is the highest point, but not that stellar. After the top, you hike down to get to the Eagle Bluffs where you can see Vancouver, and on a clear day, Vancouver Island. This is where we did Kung Fu and ate lunch]

Kung Fu with a view was great! We had a bit of an audience, as we always do at the beach, but we were mostly distracted by the view and the tiredness and the hunger! We focused just on arms, obviously our legs were getting a good workout from the hiking.

Anyway, the section between the summit and the Eagle Bluffs was my favourite - it was downhill a fair bit and snowy. My choral conducting friend and I were the only ones who took crazy carpets. Someone had obviously just left them there for other people's enjoyment. There were lots of little places to slide down on the crazy carpets, lots of screaming and fun! My butt was pretty much soaked for that whole section of the hike

Before we reached the Eagle Bluffs, we ditched the carpets so that other people could enjoy them near the snow.

I hate regretting things, but I regret not holding on to the carpets for another hour! Halfway down, we reached the biggest hill! It was next to an off-season ski hill. My snow friend and I ran down the hill and had fun doing that, but it would have been SO MUCH FUN to have had the carpets.

Oh well.

The hike was great!

Later in the evening, I went to a bonfire and we had s'mores.

It was a fantastic day!