#486

Weekend Round-Up: Nature Y'All*

After the Jeopardy! match on Friday where the students beat the faculty by $1, I raced frantically home to finish my required residency contract paperwork. Then it was off to the class play. Wow! Was that an (expectedly) good time and (unexpectedly) seamless! We were in stitches! Honestly, my cheeks hurt I laughed so hard. My favorite skits were a parody of my mentor and the "FUGLY" syndrome (Frontal bossing, Unusual facies, Glossomegaly, Low set ears, and Yo' momma is ugly), and a parody of a part of ESPN's "Sports Zone" called "Knocked Up," in which 2 sports casters made fun of all of the students in our class who had babies in medical school. Seriously, out of a class of 94 students, we're on to 25 babies. Then it was off to the local bar for some fun times.

On Saturday, 48 of us got up and boarded a 9 AM bus for the Finger Lakes. We toured 3 wineries, shared many bottles of wine, and made it home without losing our lunch. It was such an awesomely fun day, if sweltering. I skipped the tasting at the second winery as they had an indoor cat. Instead, I ran around the grounds smelling lilacs and communing with bullfrogs in the retention pond. The countryside was so beautiful...miles and miles of green grass almost completely blanketed by yellow dandelions. And a half a mile in the distance, a wide and twisty lake, just like the Hudson River or what I think Switzerland might look like.

Sunday, I fell apart. We'll skip right over that one. I did make it to the grocery store, however.

Today, Romeo, Ben, and I drove back into the Finger Lakes to go waterfalling. As pretty as the following pictures are, they do not do the trip justice.

The view from the start of the trail. The greens really were this green.


As we were starting out, we spotted this snake with some prey in its mouth. Never did figure out what he was eating.

You can just make out the water flow to the right of the frame. This gives a pretty accurate impression of the parts of the hike that were not larger water falls. The terrain was pretty rocky, and we were constantly making switchbacks across the river from one bank to the other.


The water started out like this...


Eventually, the waterfalls got bigger...


...and bigger...

...until we hit a large water fall and scrambled to the top. This is the pool at the top of the first falls (we climbed 3 in 2 hours), and Romeo is here to give you a sense of the size of the canyon we were in. And check out that blue sky! I didn't get any pictures of the big falls as I was too exhausted by that point...


This was one of the hardest parts of the terrain. See that rope to the right of the water fall? Yep, we rock climbed our way 40 feet up the sides of the canyon. I thought we were supposed to be hiking.


Romeo called this spot the "sanctuary."


I couldn't decide if a gnome or a troll lived here. The group consensus was a troll because trolls live under bridges and near water.


The sky was so blue!


The view coming down.

The descent was so much harder than the ascent, and I fell twice. I dislocated my spinal column in high school, and ever since that have had a minimal amount of residual weakness in my left leg. It's really slight, and I'm probably the only neurologist who would ever pick up on it (wink, wink). Anyhow, this hike/rock climb was definitely challenging, and I'm a) out of shape, and b) not male like Romeo and Ben, so I was pretty exhausted by the end of it. On the way down, my left leg went numb and gave out, and I slid down this rush into the pool at the bottom of the frame. The height was about 6 feet. I knew I'd be okay, and the whole time I had Blood, Sweat, and Tear's "Spinning Wheel" going in my head: "What goes up, must come down..." I got a good soaking (and yes, I was wearing a bathing suit). My camera survived as these pictures attest, but I got a good scare. The cold water, my wet clothes, and my numb leg made the rest of the trip hard, but I lived to tell the tale.

Along the way, we saw these amazing white flowers that looked like crosses between wild irises and orchids. We saw 3 falls, between 40 and 60 feet high. The temperature was amazing...low 70s with a breeze.

At the end of the trail, we drank a bottle of pinot noir that Romeo picked up at one of Saturday's wineries. I got a bit tipsy, and then we stopped by this amazing roadside stand for the first soft-serve twist of the season, and a plate of amazingly crispy fries. Ben and I ate our ice cream in a 200 year-old cemetery at the bottom of a mountain, with a quaint town to our right and some vineyards to our left. Romeo refused to follow (something about growing up in New Orleans, I suppose). All in all, one of the most perfect days imagined. Except now I am a stinky Pete (some of the falls smelled like sulfur), and I've ruined a pair of shorts and a white t-shirt.

*Don't know if you still read my blog, Kathleen, but I had this titled in my head the whole time we were hiking. And then your post was about the same thing. Great minds think alike.