Probably when I climbed my first fourteen-er in Colorado. And the thing is, I didn't really stick close to my friends, and that's what made it kind of difficult. I, I was out of shape. I was not acclimated to the elevation out west. We decided to climb a 14,000 foot mountain less than a day after my arrival from Michigan. And these are not excuses, I don't excuse anything. These are the literal reasons: bad shape, didn't have the hiking experience, no acclimation to elevation, it made everything extremely difficult.  And I -- I tried to stick with my friends. I remember the first 50 minutes of that hike or so, I cranked right along with them, and I was feeling really good. I was like, “Gosh we're gonna, we're gonna reach the top of this thing in no time.” And then we stopped to look at my friend's pedometer, and we were like one tenth of the way up. You know, probably not quite that bad, but it was, it was rough. We had just broken the tree line, and turns out. You know, the toughest portion of that climb was through the snow above the tree line, exposed, with -40° temperatures.  And I wish my friends could have stuck with me, but I was going so prohibitively slow that they had to push forward a little bit. And I really remember just seeing them up above me and not wanting to lose sight of them at all. And they did a relatively good job of waiting for me at certain checkpoints before they pulled away again, but really rough day, and they never truly left me. On the way down we stuck together, and it was pretty miserable. We made it to the top. That was great. I sustained the worst burns of my life on the portions of my face that weren't covered. It was altogether a pretty miserable experience, but I'm proud to have done it.

A couple of hikes that I remember in particular -- one was in the Canadian Rockies. I was in Banff and we had done -- we did, we did two different hikes, like one after the other, one day and then the next day. And, of course, I can't remember either -- what either one of them was called. One of them, there was a tea house. We ended at a tea house, and I think that it might have been like, a tea -- something with that tea house. And I think that you left from Lake Louise. I feel like we walked around Lake Louise and then took, you know, went up, went up into the mountains from there. Possibly -- boy, I should really look this up, I don't know. But we ended up at this tea house and all I kept thinking the whole time is, there's a tea house up here, and all of the things that are in this tea house, someone had to trek up this mountain, and all of the fresh supplies that they have at this cafe are brought in daily or weekly or whatever it is, and somebody literally is trekking them up the mountain. There's no, you know, no way to get them up there other than somebody’s, somebody's bringing them up on their back or something. So, I thought that was pretty impressive.  But I was really grateful to get there. I was, I was ready. And apparently, that's not -- I mean, that's not the end, it’s not as far as you can go. You can keep going. But I was, I was pretty much done when we got to that little tea house, but it was, it was a nice little tea house. 

So, our first trip to Florida, we went to Disney World. It was in January. And there was no snow to speak of in Michigan. It started snowing a little bit in Ohio, but it was not a big deal, just a little bit of snow. We hit Kentucky, still a little bit of snow.  But the state of Kentucky freaked the f*** out, pardon my French. And so the National Guard came in and they had tow trucks and they, they routed -- after like eight hours, they routed I-75 back North. This was over like an inch and a half of snow. So, we're just like, "Are they insane?" It's like, can we just show Michigan Driver’s Licenses and be like, "Look, we know what to do, can we just go?"  But what we ended up doing, because we still wanted to go to Florida, is we decided to get off on one of the mountain roads and so we drove through the mountains of Kentucky and Tennessee, off on just those little mountain roads. Pretty much nobody out there. We saw one car with Ohio plates, and snow plows. And that was it. And we got there safe. 

And so, I had just finished all my finals in college. And it had been, like, a grueling week of finals for me. I don't remember much about it other than I was like, so over it. And I was like, I have -- ‘cause -- you know, when you're, when you're writing a paper, or you're doing something that takes a lot of focus, you feel like you're very kind of closed in and you're very focused. You have like, tunnel vision and you’re -- every little word has to be right, and every period has to be in the right spot and your I's have to be dotted and your T's have to be crossed, blah, blah blah. You know. I wasn't writing in cursive, but it was a lot of focus involved, and it's like the little tiny things have to be perfect.  And after that I was like, I just wanna do the opposite, and I wanna get messy and chaotic and have everything be crazy and nothing in its place. It was like, I have to just balance this out. And I called up my friend, and I was like -- this was -- I don't think it was in December. It would have been in the spring, it would have been Spring semester. So, it would have been like May. And it had been raining a lot. And I knew of a place where there was a lot of mud, it was a soccer field complex. And it was just mud everywhere, if you went on the edges of the field. And I said, “Hey, I need to get crazy. Let's go to the soccer field and just roll around in the mud.” And he was like, “Hell yeah, let's do that.”  And so, we got on like, clothes that were, you know, second-hand, like crappy old beat up clothes, and our boots. And we -- it was nighttime, it would have been like midnight, 1 a.m., around that time period. And we parked at the -- we parked far away so like, the cops wouldn't know we were there, cause I'm pretty sure it was closed after dark.  We got into the park and we found where all the gross, sticky, gooey mud was, and we walked through that mud, up to our knees, and just slogged through it, and we sat down in it, and we had a mud fight, and we threw mud at each other. And it was great. It was just what I needed after a very grueling week of finals, just to like, go crazy, get dirty, and just not care about anything. And yeah, it was, we -- you know, it was totally planned out, so we, we had our, you know, newspapers in the car to sit on and everything. It was like, perfect, it was the greatest thing, and we got pictures of it afterwards and we’re covered in mud. And we're like, giving a thumbs up, like “Yeah!” That was one of my most fun experiences, like, of my life, just doing that.