epic okefenokee adventure, part II

We took our snack break before paddling off into Chesser prairie.  After not very long, Marius and I stopped to take pictures of the water lilies.  And sometime around then I had the brilliant idea to use our silly little life vests (kid sized) as seat cushions.  WOW.  That helped a lot!  Those solid plastic seats are NOT made for comfort!

water lily

note the piles of brown on the right of this picture - those are peat blow-ups

 When we were at least 4 miles into the swamp, we encountered our first "peat blow-up" - pieces of peat dislodged from the bottom of the swamp.  It was significantly harder to paddle through and around the mess created, but we made it.  Little did we know that was just the first - we had to struggle through five or six, some worse than others.  Dan started calling it "swamp doo-doo," a name that stuck for the rest of the trip.  We saw white wading birds with curved beaks - the White Ibis, although I ended up not getting any pictures of them.  We also saw Great Egrets, both wading and sitting on the tops of trees.

great egret atop a tree

try paddling through swamp doo-doo sometime...  it builds character!

 After one of the worst sections of swamp doo-doo, thick and around a curve, Marius and I waited for Dan when we hadn't spotted him behind us for a while.  It started to rain, so we turned back to find him, thinking it would not be pleasant to be stuck in the peat, alone, in the rain.  When we finally found him, he decided to put on his rain poncho.  He didn't last long with it on - it was way too warm to do any kind of exercise under a sheet of plastic.

dan in the rain

At the next area of swamp doo-doo, we used my 15' rope to tie Dan's canoe to ours so we could tow him through if it got too tough.  Sometime between 2:30 and 3 pm, we paddled in to Monkey Lake.  We tied our canoes up to the walkway by the composting toilet and unloaded all our gear.

monkey lake from google maps showing our home for the night

success!  we paddled 7.5 miles!

composting toilet outhouse with canoes pulled up next to the walkway

We all got into the larger canoe to check out Buzzard's Roost Lake - it was one half mile past Monkey Lake and had been recommended as a good place to watch the sunset.  We spotted our second alligator on the way there, on the side of the little waterway, and our third once we got out into the lake - it quickly submerged.  Marius attempted to fish for a little while although he had been warned that there weren't many fish for the catching.  He decided a canoe, especially with two other people, was not an ideal fishing setup.

this photo at buzzard's roost lake shows i didn't use enough sunscreen!

We headed back to our camp since it was much to early for sunset and set up the tents to let them dry from the night before.  We made our second fancy dinner- a pared down version of this spicy tuna couscous recipe.  YUM!  I had brought a small container with diced red bell pepper, cucumber (homegrown!), and green onion, all soaked in a little bit of vinegar, since I wasn't about to bring the lemon juice listed in the recipe.  It added just the right touch of sour flavor.

unstaked tents, draped rainflies, plans for calm weather

After cleaning up our dishes, we went back out to Buzzard's Roost to watch the sun set.  It was quite beautiful, and size of the lake allowed us to get back from the trees to get a better view.

sunset at buzzard's roost lake

reflections on the way back to camp

We headed back and enjoyed a cup of tea, sitting around the picnic table.  We heard many strange sounds, including a couple of loud, deep growls.  I have just confirmed that alligators do indeed growl.  I nervously laid on my back to look at the stars, and was soon joined by both of the guys.  The Milky Way was visible, although our limited viewing area didn't present any recognizable constellations.  We did see a few shooting stars.  I tried to get a photo of the stars, but I guess our platform wasn't quite stable enough to get a non-blurry photo, at least not with a 12 minute exposure like this one:

at least you can see the cloudiness of the milky way and a little bit of star trails...

My last attempt at a long exposure photo, I looked up walked out to close the shutter and pick up the camera.  "Pointless," I said, "There are clouds covering most of the stars!"
After I packed my camera back in its case, put away my mini-tripod, and settled in for the night, logic kicked in...  we had been seeing lightning flashes in the distance for hours and hearing thunder, AND clouds had just covered over our sparkling clear view of the stars.  It just might rain!  I convinced Marius (since Dan wasn't moving) to help me flip the canoes over so we wouldn't have canoes full of water in the morning.  A few raindrops fell as we completed this task.  We moved the hanging spot for our food bags from the edge of the shelter to a spot more under the roof.  We tossed anything we saw that might need to stay dry into the tents, then the thunderstorm really hit.  Within a couple of minutes, we were being bombarded with heavy, horizontal rain.  Marius and I scrambled to secure the rainfly of the larger tent to anything and everything in sight.  I ended up tying the lines to the posts of the shelter and the bench of the picnic table, while he tied his side to his smaller tent, which fortunately had needed to be anchored earlier in order to be properly set up.  I was completely soaked when I crawled back into the tent, and incredibly thankful I had thought to bring a full-size towel.  Dan stayed comfy and dry...

So ends part II.  Part III to follow soon.

epic okefenokee adventure, part I

1,000,000s of stars

over 600 miles in the car
100s of sounds in the night
more than 32 bug bites
about 17.5 miles paddled in canoes
9 gallons of water
at least 8 square inches of bad sunburn
3 alligators spotted (zero photographed)
3 lakes
3 people
2 canoes
2 nights
1 campground
1 camping platform
1 ridiculous thunderstorm
1 epic adventure

This plan germinated back in September on the hike at Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park.  Marius expressed interest in checking out the Okefenokee Swamp which coincidentally had been one of the places I was scouting online for a possible hike.  A couple of weeks ago, I started looking into making this a reality for my next non-working weekend, October 6-7.  On further investigation, I discovered that a swamp is not really hikeable.  There are only about 8 miles of hiking trails in all 438,000 acres of the swamp.  However, there are canoe trails leading to camping platforms out on the swamp.  We decided to forge ahead with the plan, reserving a campsite for Friday night just north of the swamp and a platform in the swamp for Saturday night.

Friday couldn't come soon enough!  As soon as I was done with class, I hurried home, tossed all my gear in the car, and drove off to pick up Marius and Dan.  We headed into Atlanta's Friday afternoon traffic and inched our way south.  After a stop at Walmart to stock up on water (3 gallons per person), and a small argument with my GPS in the dark, we finally arrived at Laura S. Walker State Park south of Waycross to check into our campsite with about 30 minutes to spare - at 10 PM we would forfeit our reservation.  We set up the tents and then used Marius' handy Jetboil stove to make a late dinner - whole wheat linguine with pesto and shrimp.

campsite in the dark

I THINK it rained that night, but I'm not sure.  There was definitely a constant drip from the trees even after we got up in the morning, and the rainfly was soaked on each tent.  We awoke to thick fog, ate our oatmeal, repacked the tents into the car, and headed off for the swamp, first taking a leisurely drive by Laura S. Walker Lake at the edge of the campground.  The fog was thick enough that I had to keep my speed down in quite a few places in order to feel safe driving in it.  And my gas light came on so we were searching for a gas station through the fog as well!

laura s. walker lake in the fog

almost to the start point!

We got to Okefenokee Adventures at the Suwannee Canal Recreation Area just west of Folkston before 10 AM, the time by which you're supposed to be on the water if you're going to camp in the swamp.  The chatty women behind the counter finally went through all most of the paperwork and sent us on our way.  We pulled up to the canal where two canoes, a double and a single, were set out for us with paddles and life vests.  Packing all our gear in the canoes took a while, especially trying to balance out the loads fairly between the two canoes.

marius and dan sorting through our stuff

Finally, we were off!  Dan chose the single canoe, so Marius and I took the double.  We admired the beauty of the canal's mirror-like reflections, the cypress trees, and spanish moss "dripping" from the trees.

cypress trunk with spanish moss

reflections on the canal

 After two miles on the main canal, we reached a branching where we turned off to the left onto the Pink Trail.  Here we spotted our first alligator - Marius saw it moving through the water, I saw the snout, eye, and back barely in view before it sunk out of sight.  No chance to grab cameras...  Once we were off the Suwannee Canal, there were a lot fewer trees.  This area is called "Chesser Prairie" - swamp prairies certainly are a lot different than those in the middle of the country!

snack ,water, and sunscreen stop as we turned off the main canal

chesser prairie

yellow marks our route - start upper right, end at monkey lake

The above map shows about 1/16 of the entire swamp.  Gotta love Google maps!  It's now getting a bit late, so I'm going to call this the end of part I.  More to come...

in the interim

Since my last post, I've been plugging along - going to school, taking exams, climbing at the climbing wall, everything else that constitutes "normal" life here.

Here's my most prolific harvest of the season (note the penny for scale):

homegrown cucumbers and tomatoes!

All of my cucumbers were pear-shaped - the one on the right is the most any of them filled out.  The pale orange tomato decided to fall off when I picked the red one.

I've finally started getting paid for working at the climbing wall - an extra $16 a week can't hurt!  Over the summer, I got a few of the first year DPTs into climbing at the wall, now I've got a couple third years gung-ho for climbing.  My big, Kim, and Morgan tried it out for the first time at the beginning of September and have come regularly since then, and are both now belay certified as well.

kim climbing

morgan belaying kim

kim belaying morgan as she heads up to finish this route for the first time

soccer game under the lights and a spectacular sunset as i left the gym

I also spent a concentrated amount of time planning and packing - next post will cover my most recent adventure, and an epic adventure it was!!

a day of thankfulness

Yesterday was a good, good day.  Maybe I should count my blessings...  Here are a few:

I started off Sunday morning waking up from a good night's sleep (1).  It was cool and comfortable weather (2), something I can't get enough of here.  My cup of tea was perfect and hot (3), the sun was shining (4), and I got all green lights on the way to church (5).  If you've ever driven Clifton Road through the Emory University campus, you know that's a pretty big deal.

I had a good time of fellowship and worship at church (6), followed by lunch with friends (7) to which one friend sneakily treated us all (8)!  In the afternoon, I went to Sarah's house (a first year DPT student) to borrow a guitar (9) for the rest of the semester.  That evening, I went to dinner with more friends and had another really good time (10).  Incidentally, I wish that dinner could be a model for international relations - we had 1 Jew, 2 Christians, and 4 Muslims all enjoying dinner and conversation together.

Later that night, before bed, I tuned the guitar and played for a while.  It makes me SO happy to have a guitar to play (#9 again)!!

such a cute little guitar it is!

service of gratitude and civil war history hike

Yesterday I attended the Service of Gratitude for the first year DPT class.  This service occurs after the first semester as a Thank You to those who anonymously donated their bodies to science for use in the anatomy lab.  I chose to attend since I also was able to learn from the cadavers used by this year's anatomy class since I helped out in lab 6 or 8 times this past summer.  It was a very nice service with three musical tributes and two speeches from the first year students.

Today was one of the few Saturdays where I didn't have to work, so I collected a couple PT school friends (3rd year) and one climbing wall friend and we headed out to Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park for a hike.  None of the first years could make it as their White Coat Ceremony was today.  It was the site of a battle in the Atlanta Campaign with the Confederates eventually losing the city of Atlanta to the Union Army.

The weather was pretty much completely overcast - we all expected it as we had individually ascertained that there was a 70% chance of thunderstorms.  Not too hot, but mercilessly humid.  Unfortunately, we chose a day where the trail club was doing trail maintenance, so the area surrounding the visitor's center was very crowded and noisy, as were the first mile and a half of the trail.  Thankfully, it got a lot quieter as we went along.

morgan and marius by a cannon along the ridge

paige looks like she might be up to something

yellow demarcates our route

On top of Little Kennesaw Mountain, Marius pointed out that the sky was getting pretty dark.  We stopped and looked all around at the sky, consulted a smartphone weather app, and decided to press on.  Shortly after we crossed Burnt Hickory Road, Paige suggested we take the next turn to loop back since Morgan had a dinner to attend this evening.  As we were hiking back, it rained a bit, but not hard and not for long.  We stopped for lunch at a collection of logs, and then made our way back to the start.  After looking for a while at the map, I believe we went just over 6 miles round trip.

We made a brief stop at the visitor's center, and then walked back to the overflow parking lot where we'd started.  Paige's turnaround suggestion timing was prescient - it started raining again right after we left the visitor's center building, and was pouring by the time we got back to the car.  It rained hard off and on for the entire drive back, and was an absolute downpour when I got home.

So, another successful hiking trip.  The weather didn't lend itself to photogenic scenery, so those were actually the only two photos I took.  Now it's time to gather my materials and think about studying for Wednesday's "Quiz!"

4/9 done!

My final practical for the summer semester was almost a month ago.  I realized that although I am less than halfway done with my program, I am MORE than half done with classroom work - of the remaining 5 semesters, 2 are spent on clinical rotations!  So far, I know that my first one will be in San Diego - I'll be there from early January through mid-March.  I'll hopefully know within the next month where my remaining two clinical rotations will be.

I had a great learning experience at Benchmark Physical Therapy in Woodstock, GA.  My clinical instructors allowed me to treat at least a dozen patients in the course of my two weeks, from neck to toes!  They challenged me in the best possible way, having patients tell me if I was able to match any given technique they applied.  I wished I could have just stayed there and worked with them instead of going back to sitting long hours in classrooms.

I spent most of my very short break working, although Saturday afternoon and evening was spent making dinner for a few first year DPT students as they studied for their anatomy finals - written and practical.  Dan (a 3rd year) and I prepared both Vietnamese spring rolls and chicken potstickers.  This was my first attempt at potstickers instead of wontons, and my first try with chicken instead of pork filling for dumplings.  It was successful, I must say!

katherine and dan with the spring roll fixings

sultan and moire making potstickers

potstickers!

michelle, sultan, and moire full and ready for a movie!

We finished off the evening watching "The Princess Bride."  Since Michelle had never seen it, we all agreed it was necessary.  For some reason, I couldn't get my DVD player to work with my TV, so we ended up watching it on my computer monitor.  The screen is about as big as the TV anyway, and better quality!

Garden update - I've been enjoying my occasional cherry tomato (ate one yesterday) and have eaten one of my cucumbers.  I think there are 5 on the vines right now, and they're funny - they're pear-shaped!  One of them is becoming slowly less pear-shaped, I'll probably pick it and eat it soon.

the first cucumber as it lost its pear shape

School has started again, we're in the third week.  Our first "Quiz" is Wednesday.  Apparently, the faculty have been requested to call all tests "Quizzes" from here on out.  We'll see how that goes...

this gorgeous plumeria is in a front yard i pass daily on the way to school

The first Sunday afternoon of the semester, Rob, Jessica, and I visited Zoo Atlanta.  Not much was going on - the weather was pretty muggy, so I don't blame the animals for not wanting to do much.  It was still fun!

jessica and rob - possibly the first ever bearded meerkat!

the elephant was enjoying his bath

only one of their 5 otters was moving around, and not for long

sleepy red panda

giant panda on the move

My schedule this semester has a nice twist compared to previous semesters - the times are almost completely consistent from week to week.  Now if they could only get us in the same room from week to week for each class, it might feel like a normal school!

movies, hikes, and more!

I've been busy the past couple of weeks, and am currently staying in Acworth with Cousin Linda, commuting to Woodstock to an outpatient clinic for my second two week clinical.

Two weekends ago I joined a bunch of first year PT students (15) to watch The Dark Knight Rises - the newest Batman movie.  Moire organized the crowd and bought tickets online since it was still the opening day of the movie.  It was fun, a good (but not great (sorry, Batman lovers)) movie.

they never showed the movie title...

The next morning I got up pretty early and joined Dan and Sultan for a trip out to Dahlonega to check out Amicalola Falls, the tallest falls in Georgia.  Dan's timing was perfect weather-wise - it rained a bit on the way out there, and started pouring after we finished.

me, dan, and sultan before all the stairs

bottom of the falls

upper part of the falls, 175 steps up

real-life forrest gump (in the red)

We met a real-life Forrest Gump (thanks to Dan's friendliness/ chattiness).  This guy was at least mid-70s if not over 80.  He ran downhill past us as we were hiking down, then while still in sight, stopped, turned around, and ran back up.  When we had made it to the bottom and started hiking up the first 175 stairs by the falls, he passed us a third time, this time heading downhill.  While we were on the 425 step portion of the uphill, he caught up to us a fourth time.  Dan greeted him, and he chatted long enough to tell us he was training to run from Savannah, GA to Monterey, CA!!  He passed us a fourth time at the top of the falls, munching a granola bar as he proved he wasn't even planning to stop to eat!

view from the top of the falls

That next week, I had two written finals.  The second was Friday morning.  After that was over, Moire and I met up and headed to the Georgia Aquarium.  The Aquarium opened in 2005, long after my last trip to Atlanta with my parents.  We headed out to the Lindbergh MARTA Station to take public transportation - that saved us $12 parking, and cost $5 each - $2 cash savings plus gas and wear and tear on the car...

view from garson parking deck at lindbergh marta station

fish as entering the aquarium - first exhibit

whale shark - biggest one at aquarium is 26 feet long!

funny little garden eels - they retract back under the sand when a fish comes close

jellies!

moire and me

moire and i enjoyed photographing the frogs - perhaps because they were more brightly lit than fish

"possibly the most poisonous animal on earth"

specifically, this guy is supposed to be the most poisonous, not the most colorful

creepy looking alligator

adorable otter

cute beluga whale

The next morning, not quite so early as the previous weekend, Moire, Dan, Katherine and her mother, and I went out to Sweetwater Creek State Park for a hike.  I was hoping that the recent rains would make the falls more impressive than they were back in November, but that was not the case.  Nevertheless, it was a fun hike, especially walking out on the rocks on the creek.

moire by the old textile mill ruins

moire, katherine, and dan - just another pose...

My current clinical rotation has been fun and intense so far - I've observed a lot of different techniques and also been asked to do a lot of them myself.  It's been challenging and a great learning experience, and it isn't even half over yet!