What Makes Me Laugh

The thing about hiking in New Hampshire is that you can be standing at the bottom of the mountain, enjoying a warm day, and yet at the top you’re hoping not to die from exposure.

We climbed Mount Eisenhower with Doug’s brother Don, who fearlessly led us up the mountain as if climbing a 1,000 granite rocks were nothing. I have to say — I missed the West’s switchbacked, graded trails. Or, at least, my calves missed those trails the next day. New Hampshire trails are not for wimps. They are straight up and straight down and if you think that 6 miles don’t sound like much, well, think again.

When we reached the top a fog had settled in, and a fierce wind blew around us so we bundled up before making our attempt at the summit. Mount Eisenhower is part of the White Mountains, a range that includes Mount Washington, which truly has the worst weather in the lower coterminous United States. Today’s weather at the summit included 80 mph winds and snow.

I always like to pretend I’m readying for the the summit of Everest so I wrote “attempt” but it really wasn’t that bad. We were mostly worried about Don, who was wearing shorts, but claimed not to even feel the sting of sleet that fell on his legs.

From the top you’re supposed to be able to see Mount Washington, the tallest mountain in New England, but we could barely see our knees.

We did see a fox though, who was headed quickly into the brush to look for any remnants of lunch we might have left behind.

I think he had the last laugh.

Montana summers are the kind of summers people in southern parts dream about. They vacation here in dry 75 degree weather, with a cool breeze at night to ripple the leaves of the aspen trees, and talk about moving here someday.

Some of them do, and most of them leave after two years, when they finally realize the good weather lasts about six weeks. After that, days get windy and cold fast. But I’m not ready to ruin the mood yet with talk of bad weather. Right now I’m basking in the manic good mood that comes with lots of light and warmth and the all important vacation. Which is why, for those keeping track, I’ve been a little slower to blog, and a little quicker to play outside this month.

We just returned from hiker’s paradise, Glacier National Park, where I spent my “coming of age” summer between college semesters what seems an age ago. Glacier is a magical place. It’s full of grand mountain vistas, waterfalls, wildlife, and wild college students. Since it’s only open for three months a year in a fairly remote location, it results in a perfect marriage between corporate greed and broke college students. Which is why I saw at least two apoplectic tourists yell at the desk clerk while we were there.

Doug at Siyeh Pass

I worked in the kitchen in one of the grand lodges when I worked there. I learned to hate cantaloupe, and salad bars, and sandwiches, and pretty much all the food I had to manhandle on a daily basis. But I had a wonderful time with my coworker singing off Broadway tunes in the kitchen, and a so-so time singing country western cabaret at night for tourists (you can only sing the Tennessee Waltz a few times before you want to kill someone, preferably yourself).

The lodge at Many Glacier

I also learned to love hiking and grizzly bears and huckleberry ice cream and karaoke that summer. The karaoke thing hasn’t lasted (thank god) but the rest of it stuck. Which is why I jump at the chance to go back to Glacier every summer. You can see why.

Though the park has a few more visitors than I remember, the hikers are still quite a congenial crowd. We met a nice familial trio on the hike up to Grinnell Glacier. An enthusiastic father and his two sons strode along with us, and the 12-year-old kept a steady chatter going, giving the grizzly bears some fair warning of our presence.

The trail to Grinnell Glacier

“Where are you from?” I said.

“Wisconsin,” he answered.

“Wisconsin!” I said. “You know, we met some people on the trail yesterday from Wisconsin and I told them that everyone I’ve ever met from Wisconsin has been friendly. You have a very nice state.”

“It’s the cheese,” his dad replied. “It keeps us mellow.”

“That’s what they said yesterday. That exact quote!” I said, which was true, and they had also been exceedingly friendly.

When we arrived at Grinnell Glacier, we stopped for a late lunch, and I offered to share our smorgasbord of crackers, veggies, and other good stuff with the family because it seemed that the only item they brought with them to eat was Wisconsin cheese. The dad pulled out a large bag of sweating Wisconsin cheddar and string cheese from his backpack and swapped  it for some crackers and garden sweet peas. It was very good, and when I said so he gave a knowing smile and then a lecture on the evils of California cheese and the audacity of the Laughing Cow people to air ads in his state. Really, I’m not kidding. These people are serious about their cheese!

“Where’s your cheese from?” he said, pointing to the small wrapped packet of cheddar I carried to go with our crackers.

I looked down, a little ashamed.

“France.”

Fortunately, they had already agreed to take our picture.

Hannah demonstrates her "jazz hands" on the trail to Lake Agnes

I get very annoyed with magazine editors who run teasers like, “The Top 10 secret hiking spots, or secret small towns, or secret erogenous zones, or some such nonsense.”

I mean, c’mon, do we have to advertise the best places to the whole world? Why can’t some things remain undiscovered?

So, it’s with some regret that I will announce my new favorite hiking trail. Though it’s really no secret. Lots of people visit it already. Just don’t tell anyone else, will you?

Last Friday we hiked to the teahouse at Lake Agnes, a beautiful glacial lake in the Canadian Rockies. The teahouse has no running water or electricity and all of its goods are brought in by foot, or horseback. It even has its own facebook page (so it’s not too secret). To get there, you hike about 3.4 kilometers from Lake Louise in Banff National Park. That’s the only clue I’m giving. You’ll just have to be adventurous and find it on your own from there.

Lake Agnes teahouse

Anyway, my sister Laura planned the hike and though Doug and I dragged behind a little bit, she and Hannah patiently waited for us to make it to the teahouse.

When we arrived, I was stunned by the selection. They don’t serve just any old tea. We chose Adams Peak Rare White Tea because Laura insisted that having Earl Gray would be a little like going to a specialty ice cream shop and ordering Vanilla. Point taken.

The Teahouse menu

Our waiter sold us on the tea when he explained that it is one of the few teas to be harvested above 8,000 feet on “a mountain sacred to almost all of the world’s religions” with a peak called “the footprint of Buddha.” Well … this tea must be tried. It was delicate and flavorful, just like my lemon poppyseed cake, and it gave me some extra oomph in my step as we climbed the next 2 kilometers to the peak of the Beehive for a spectacular view of the Canadian Rockies.

At the Beehive summit

On the drive back, we passed by Canmore, where Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt used to share a home. It was at this moment in the drive that Hannah turned and repeated a question to me that she overheard two other women puzzling over. It was a question so complex and concerning that I’m not sure it will ever be answered to anyone’s satisfaction.

She looked over at me in the car and said, “Why do you think Jennifer Aniston can’t keep a boyfriend?”

And so it is that I leave you with that little brain puzzler of a question, to be discussed over a pot of sacred tea in the heights of the Rocky Mountains. Truly, the answer may be the world’s final hidden secret.

I was going to call this post, “The Last Supper” and then I realized just how inappropriate that would be on Good Friday.

On our final day in Tasmania and our final night in Australia, we sampled some of the best that the country has to offer. The best rainforest in Tasmania has to be Mount Field National Park, which sits near the heart of Tasmania’s wildest country.

Mount Field's gorgeous rainforest

Russell Falls

We took a beautiful circuit hike amongst the tall trees and waterfalls of Mount Field in the morning, but not before we sampled the best coffee and hot chocolate in Tasmania.

Australians are serious about coffee. Bars (or pubs, as they call them) have espresso machines. Even a lot of gas or petrol stations have espresso machines – although we passed on one that offered espresso made from instant coffee (eeugh). I don’t drink coffee, but I do drink hot chocolate, and I can say that the hot chocolate is much better there too — not so sweet, and a lot finer chocolate than Hershey’s.

Anyway, we stopped at the Possum Shop and had our best coffee and a delectable breakfast of sticky date pudding, which is not a pudding at all, but more of a gooey caramel cake, and scones and fresh raspberry jam. I’m salivating just thinking about it.

Doug was on a quest to find the best fish and chips in Tasmania. Seriously, if he could have, he would have eaten fish and chips for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. He thought the best was found in Strahan, on the west coast, but a pretty good runner-up was found in Hobart, where we stopped before our evening flight. The high-end fish is blue eye trevalla, a meaty white fish that is probably most similar to cod in our part of the world.

Downtown Hobart

After the fish and chips

Like a lot of nights while we were traveling, we missed having a proper dinner. This time our flight times interfered and by the time we arrived in Adelaide it was past nine, and past closing for most restaurants (they close really early in Australia). So we dined on takeout pizza on a park bench while listening to a woman playing an acoustic guitar at a local pub cover Green Day’s “Time of Your Life” and watching the intensely bright southern hemisphere stars. It sounds sappy, but it was the best last supper to be found in Australia.

One of my favorite New England yarns from Doug is a story about a tourist who stops at a little town in Maine to ask for driving directions. He sees an old Mainer sitting outside a coffee shop and asks, “Can you tell me how to get to Bangor?”

The Mainer looks at him, and slowly drawls out, “You can’t get there from here.”

Puzzled, the tourist asks, “Well, where does this road go?”

“Don’t go nowhere,” the Mainer answers. “Stays right here.”

I wish you could hear Doug tell it in his New England accent. It kills me every time.

During the last part of the trip, I felt a lot like that tourist in Maine. The roads in Tasmania didn’t seem to go anywhere but there.

Before we left on our trip, I studied up on Tasmania, visiting travel websites and keeping a hefty Fodor’s guide by my besides at night. Fodor was pretty good except in one regard. They offered this piece of advice, “Most places within Tasmania are within easy driving distance.” And you would think so, given that Tasmania is about the size of West Virginia and also because I’m from Montana, I have a bit of an ego about driving long distances to get to good spots.  

What the guidebook didn’t say is that the roads are all narrow, mostly curvy, and it’s not at all advisable to drive at night because the woods spit nocturnal wildlife onto the road every five minutes.  

Oh, and then there is the left side of the road thing. Doug did an admirable job of driving, and only forgot a couple times (when we were on very rural roads) that he should be driving on the left, not the right. We probably had the cleanest windshield in Tasmania though because every time he went to turn on the blinker (usually on the left) he hit the windshield wiper instead.

Doug in the driver's seat on the right

So, when I planned the trip to Tasmania I had one of those traveler dilemmas — stay in one place and get to know it really well (i.e. a backpacking trip) or try to see as much as possible because you may never come back. I opted for the latter and booked a couple of nights on the West Coast, which required a drive from the East Coast and Freycinet National Park. No problem, I thought. We can do 4-5 hours in the car. If we get up early we can also hike at Lake St. Clair National Park. No problem.

I know this metaphor may not work for those you not from Montana, but what we did in one day was equivalent to driving 8 hours from Bozeman to Calgary, Alberta with a five hour hike in Glacier in the middle.

To try to speed things up, we took shortcuts across the state, asking people only an hour’s drive from the shortcut road if it was an okay road and finding that some people in Tasmania haven’t left their county in their entire lifetime.

The road less traveled

It was a long gravel road, which was marked mostly by huge logging trucks going way too fast and a forest fire that seemed awfully close to the road when we drove by. Fortunately, it led us to the beautiful Lake St. Clair National Park where we hiked through rainforest up to view two glacial lakes.

Lake St. Clair National Park

At Forgotten Lake

But that wasn’t nearly as bad as the highway to the west coast after we finished our hike. Beautiful views of glacier valleys and mountain cliffs were not seen by me, because I was trying not to gag from the motion sickness caused by hairpin turns that went on endlessly.

We stopped in Queenstown (Tasmania’s version of Butte – it has open-pit copper mining and everything) to grab some meat pies (I abstained do to the nausea) and then crept along for 40 km (it took us an hour and a half) because of all the darting wildlife in the road (rabbits, possums, and wallabies).

We arrived in the coastal village of Strahan at our B&B, drop off the baggage, and leave Hannah to sleep while we search for a “bottleshop” to buy a few bottles of beer to share back at the hotel.

Turns out the only place to buy beer in Strahan at 11 p.m. is at the bar so we turn up there to buy a six pack. Doug approaches to buy the said beer and a middle-aged man with an extremely red face and slurred speech asks us where we are from. In towns of 750, it’s easy to pick out newcomers, even if we weren’t from the country.

We’re having as decent a conversation as you can with a drunk man from Tasmania who is called a “slag” by his girlfriend (apparently that means redneck) until he decides to reach over to unzip my hooded sweatshirt (which didn’t get him very far since I had a t-shirt on underneath).

Doug’s reaction was to sort of gently push him back and say, “Hey now, she doesn’t like to be fussed with.”  

Which is hilarious in and of itself (I now tell him all the time that I don’t like to be fussed with) but I didn’t really help matters because in trying to diffuse any possible tension I said, “Oh, it’s ok.” Very lame.

Anyway, we left without any altercation and the whole incident was fairly minor, but it’s true, I don’t like to be fussed with.