Half a Week at the Trailer

After working for nearly 3 months straight (7 days a week) I took a much needed vacation at a friend's trailer.  I drove 3 hours north to the middle of nowhere to spend 4 days lounging at the beach and playing countless games of Skip-Bo and Ticket to Ride.  I came home totally relaxed and carefree.

How does this state of relaxation fit in with my newly active lifestyle you might wonder?  

First, it is necessary to recognize how mentally active and drained you are and how tense your body is from being overworked before you can add to its activity.  This prepares you to think about taking on something that will exert your body further because it is not already drained.

Second, this environment of relaxation provides far more opportunities to be active than sedentary, not to mention there are no mindless distractions like television and internet to entertain you on the couch.  When sitting in a trailer you actually seek out fresh air and things to do.

Third, it just works.

What did I do to be active at the trailer?

Swimming

Prior to my trailer visit I tried to convince my friend to swim in the lake with me.  It is the largest freshwater lake in the world without an island.  But, my friend does not like swimming (mostly because she hates wearing a bathing suit, but also because she only dog paddles) and she certainly does not like lake water. My friend does like a challenge though so we figured if she was going to swim with me she needed a purpose.  The lake is 7km by 2.5km and there is a beach in town on the far side of the lake.  We decided to make it our mission to swim the 7km across the lake to the other beach with pool noodles as our safety measure.  We figured it would take 4 hours to do.

Now I love to swim.  I lived in a pool as a kid and I easily completed my try-a-tri training for the swim portion of 300m by actually swimming 1km non-stop in the pool on many occasions.  I knew how hard 7km would be, especially in a wavy lake, but I felt like I could accomplish it.  I know my friend very well though and felt that she would give up 30 minutes in and we would have to turn around so I did not fear for our safety.  But, this is the type of thing we set out to do together when left alone (we've attempted it at one other lake before and ended up getting out and walking the entire shoreline instead).

Sadly, we did not get to attempt our swim because the weather did not cooperate.  We will try again at the end of the month.  I did make sure to swim on my own though in the frigid water 2 of the 4 days.


Hiking

As our plans to swim the lake were not looking good with the weather we sought out other ways to explore.  While riding the park's tractor ride for a tour of the campground I spotted the opening to a trail my friend did not know about.  We set out the next afternoon to see where this trail would take us.  We hiked through grass, mud, gravel, dirt paths, and woods.  We climbed up huge hills, down slopes, and around trees struck by lightning (cool to see by the way).  We had no idea where we were going or where we would end up, but we eventually choose to follow a loop back to the direction of the park.  We were very surprised to find that we emerged in the private backyard of someone's cottage.  We snuck past their house, their gardens, and their friends camping, then made our way back down the main road to our trailer site. 

My time at the trailer was so awesome that I even convinced Chris to book an extra 3 days off this summer to return to the trailer with me at the end of this month so he could enjoy the peacefulness of the woods as well.  He plans to bring his bike up with us and check out the back roads.  We'll see if I bring mine too.

For now, I'm off to enjoy a day golfing and then picnicking at the only free zoo in all of Canada (Peterborough, ON).  Ontario is a pretty amazing place if you haven't gathered that already.