Big Sandy Lodge

Image via Wikipedia

Well I'm back. I missed some really exciting tour stages. Columbia managed to open up a split in the peleton, Armstrong made the split, but Contador didn't, and lost 40 seconds. Then the next day after the team time trial, Cancellara managed to keep yellow by 22/100th of a second... Oh well so it goes. I'll catch all the exciting bits on the rest day recap.

So the vacation... We drove up right after church on Sunday and got in around 5 pm. We had dinner at the lodge. That's one thing about the Big Sandy Lodge, they make incredible meals. The next day we started off with a two hour horse-ride. I'm glad it wasn't any longer, riding a horse puts pressure on parts of my body that aren't used to it. My hip was particularly sore after the ride. The rest of the day was spent napping, reading and playing board games with the family.

Yesterday was the hike. I've been really happy with how cool and wet the summer has been thus far. What I didn't realize was that a wet June meant that the mosquitoes would be particularly bad. I've been to the Wind Rivers quite a bit, and I don't believe I've ever seen mosquitoes even half as bad as they were Tuesday morning when we started the hike. I kid you not, an hour and a half into the hike I wasn't sure I could make it. While you're moving they have at least a little difficulty keeping up, but the minute you sit down, suddenly there's literally hundreds of them. I wasn't sure how we were going to eat.

Fortunately we gained a little bit of altitude which helped thin them out and then, shortly before we were going to stop for lunch we got some wind and that really helped out. Without that, I may have lost my mind... In any case I don't want to go too overboard it was still a really nice hike. I figure we ended up doing 9 miles total, which when you consider that my youngest is 6, is pretty impressive. All told we were out for just over seven hours.

Absent the mosquitoes it was really just about the perfect vacation and even with the mosquitoes it was a really good vacation. Still, as always, it's nice to be back.

I would genocide those little devils in a heartbeat