Ryan, Debi, and Toren Cragun's Blog

Summit Date

August 15th, 2010

Party

Tom Triplett, Mark Woolley, and Ryan Cragun

Trip Report

We didn’t hike a state highpoint in 2009 as traveling to one from where we were all living was a bit too far.  But due a recent move for Mark (to Arizona), driving to Texas to hike Guadalupe Peak made sense.  Tom and I flew in on the 13th, spent the night at Mark’s place, then we drove to the campground at the trailhead on the 14th.  Here’s a photo of Guadalupe Peak Mark took on the drive in.  This is about 20 to 30 minutes west of the trailhead:

Tom in front of Guadalupe Peak, which is the peak furthest to the right; El Capitan juts out to the right of the peak (email Tom to ask him what he was doing out there)

We spent the night at Pine Spring Campground, which is right by the trailhead.  We had cell reception there, and I was even able to get internet access on my phone (which allowed me to download a Risk-like game for us to occupy our time in the evening – no fires allowed). The night was somewhat uneventful, but had a little commotion.  We only had a 2-person tent, and Mark volunteered to sleep out under the stars.  Temperature and weather wise, that probably would have been fine (and the lack of light pollution meant the stars were awesome).  But bugs-wise, it was a bad move.  Mark was getting eaten alive and it was too hot to slide all the way into his sleeping bag, so he ended up moving to the car in the middle of the night and spent the night in the car.

Mark woke Tom and I up fairly early, just as the first indications of light were peaking over the horizon (probably around 4:30 local time).  We grabbed everything and threw it into the car, geared up, and hit the trail.  Here we are at the trailhead:

Tom, Mark, and Ryan at the trailhead; it was still pretty dark when we started our hike

The hike starts out fairly level, then runs into some switchbacks as you gain elevation.  We were headed up the switchbacks when the sun broke over the horizon, necessitating us taking a few pictures:

panorama of the sun rising from the eastern slope of Guadalupe (click to enlarge)

Mark in front of the rising sun on the switchbacks

We made decent time and the hike was not particularly challenging.  Apparently the trail is horse-friendly, but there are parts that I would not want to take a horse on, as the trail is literally cut into a cliff face with rather steep drops, like this one:

Ryan and Tom on a cliff face in the morning sun

We stopped a couple times to catch our breath, but the hike was actually moderate enough that we were able to hold a pretty good conversation up the mountain.  We contemplated hiking out to El Capitan from the summit, but the trails diverge near the campground, so we opted not to. However, we had good views of El Capitan from Guadalupe Peak:

El Capitan from just below the summit of Guadalupe Peak

We actually summited in just over 2 hours.  I tried to use my phone’s GPS to track our route, and it worked on the way up, but died just after we left the summit on the way done.  According to my GPS map, our total moving time was about 2 hours and 10 minutes (which probably includes about 10 minutes of the descent).  We spent over an hour on the summit.  Here are some summit photos:

Ryan pointing out the mini-watermelon Tom carried to the top; unfortunately it wasn't very good

While we were on the summit, some clouds rolled in from the southeast. They didn’t look very menacing, and it was cool to be above the clouds, but they did prompt us to leave a little sooner than we would have otherwise so as not to get caught in a storm.  Here’s a photo showing us above the clouds:

The three of us at the summit, above the clouds

the summit marker, with one of our shirts airing out on it

panorama from the summit looking west (click to enlarge)

panorama from the summit looking east (click to enlarge)

We took a few more photos on the way down, but I really liked this one of Mark as he was on a promontory and it looked very cool:

Mark looking out over the valley to the east of the peak

We were off the mountain by about 10 am.  We saw just three other people on the trail on the way up, and they had hiked up to a primitive campground the evening before (we saw them heading out when we arrived at the campground).  On the way down we probably passed 20 or 30 people who were on their way up.  It was getting fairly hot at around 10 am, so I think we made the right decision to hike it very early, as we had great weather and the trail to ourselves.

Here’s the GPS map of the trail from my phone application:

View Guadalupe Peak in a larger map

I typically include a map to the trailhead, but the above GPS map shows where the trailhead is exactly, so you can use that.

Toren, who did sleep on the flight from Amsterdam to Atlanta, was still on Greek time, so he woke up at 2:30 ready to play.  Since I had gotten 3 hours or so of sleep on the flight, I got up with him and let Debi sleep.  We walked around the hotel until about 4:30, when we had to get up to get ready to go back to the airport.  We made it back to the airport fine and our flight to Tampa was uneventful.  We did use our meal vouchers (courtesy of Delta) to buy a bunch of donuts, though, and gave them out to various people.  Everything seemed fine when we arrived in Tampa, until one of our bags (my bag) didn’t show up.  When I asked about it, the baggage claim guy said it was still in Amsterdam according to their records, even though I carried it through customs in Atlanta.  That didn’t seem like a good sign.  Anyway, they said they’d send it to our house when they found it.  They did finally find it, the next day, and got it to us that afternoon.  So, trip complete.

Some thoughts on cruising with a young child:

• Cruises don’t really cater to really young kids (<3).  Yes, they have highchairs and cribs, and yes the staff are friendly, but kids in diapers or pullups are not allowed in any swimming pools on the ship.  Also, there is no childcare for really young kids.  There are no babysitters you can pay to watch your kid during the day.  The one daily activity they have for kids under 3 is about 45 minutes long and requires that a parent be there.  In short, cruise ships primarily cater to the old, fat, white people who predominate, then to other adults, then to their teen+ kids, then to kids between about 4 and 12 who get some special treatment.  If you are thinking about cruising with a kid under 3, don’t expect it to be all that easy.
• During one of the excursions, someone from our ship struck up a conversation with Brent and Suzy and asked them, “Are you the ones with the baby?”  Brent and Suzy said no, but that the baby was part of their group.  This person then said, “I would never travel to Europe with a baby.  How exhausting!”  Well, there is some truth to that.  Don’t expect to do all the things you could do on a cruise when you were single. On our previous cruises, we typically would go to the nightly shows and then go out dancing. With Toren, we were lucky we got up in the morning in time for our excursions (he slept in our bed and loves to kick me and toss and turn all night). Toren was reasonably well-behaved on the excursions (less so on the last two), but whenever we had an early morning excursion, we couldn’t help but crash in the afternoon before dinner.  We showered before dinner, and then after a nearly 2 hour dinner (with three courses), it was too late (8:30) to go do anything with the kids and too early to see any shows.  So, we ended up typically just going back to our room and waiting Toren out until he fell asleep.  So, yes, it’s exhausting.  But traveling is typically exhausting anyway, and so is parenting.  So, I don’t think it would have made much of a difference if we were home or on the trip – either way, Toren is a lot of work (and a lot of fun!).
• Finally, I also feel a bit guilty. Most of the staff on the ship are people from developing countries who are working on the cruise ship because this offers them a substantial improvement in life. But, they do this at great personal sacrifice. Our primary waiter, Brenda, had a child the same as age Toren, a girl. Brenda is on the ship for 7 months at a time, then home for 2. Her husband and parents take care of her daughter while she’s away. I can’t even imagine seeing Toren just 2 months out of every 9. Likewise, our room attendant, Angelina, from Mauritius, has three kids – 8, 12, and 15. She’s on the ship 6 months, then home 2. She’s been doing this for 6 years, which means she has been gone for ¾ of her children’s lives over the last 6 years. I only feel slightly better about this when I think that this means her children will have a better financial starting point than she did, but it still breaks my heart to think about how much of her children’s lives she is missing. Brenda said she cried everyday when she first came aboard the ship because she was missing her child so much. Having Toren on the ship reminds them of the kids they have left at home. So, it made me feel guilty.

Anyway, the trip was a lot of fun.  We got to see a lot of amazing things and spend time with family, which is really the point.  Some fun trip statistics for you:

• Countries visited: 5 (France, Italy, Croatia, Greece, Holland – kind of)
• Miles traveled: 13,100 (excluding walking around locally)
• Photos taken: about 2,000, but I’ve deleted some since

I hope you enjoyed the trip report!

Between Katakalon and Venice the time changed, giving us an extra hour.  Unfortunately, I forgot to set my watch back.  So, I woke up at 5:00 thinking it was 6:00, then woke Debi up at 6:30 instead of 7:30.  Oops!  It worked out okay as we got to go the nice restaurant for breakfast one last time.  We then said goodbye to the rest of the family who had different travel arrangements home and disembarked.  Everyone else was staying onboard until 3:30 as their flights were late in the evening.  We made it to the Venice airport by 9:30 but couldn’t check in for our 2:30 flight until 2 hours before, which is some bizarre rule at that airport (maybe in Europe, generally?), so we played outside near the baggage claim for a few hours.  Since we still had all of our luggage, we pulled out some of Toren’s toys and let him play with them.  This attracted the attention of some other children waiting around, so Toren ended up making a couple of friends, an Italian girl and a British girl.

We finally headed up to check in around 12:00, but the line was already very backed up for our flight.  We got really worried that we would miss our flight, especially since traveling internationally with a lap child seems to require very complicated paperwork (it took us almost 20 minutes to check us in).  We finally made it past security with minutes to spare and made it to our plane just in time to board (at the very end of the line).  Additionally, for some reason our seats weren’t together, so Debi had to handle Toren by herself.  Meanwhile, I chatted with a nice couple from England (mostly the husband), who regaled me with a number of stories, mostly about Saint Anthony (he was a devout Catholic with a deep interest in Saint Anthony).  Toren did okay on the flight, luckily, so Debi wasn’t too upset about us sitting apart.  And the couple she sat next to were helpful and understanding.

Our connection was in Amsterdam.  We had to hurry through that airport as well as we didn’t have much time between flights.  Unfortunately, however, our flight out of Amsterdam was delayed by about an hour and a half, first because of a straggler, then because of a mechanical problem. The flight was relatively uneventful, but we didn’t get much sleep.

When we arrived in Atlanta, we were delayed pulling up to a gate as well, by about 20 minutes.  Once we disembarked, we literally ran through the airport to try to catch our connection to Tampa, but we arrived at the gate just as they sealed the door to the plane.  We were not alone.  There were about 8 of us on the flight from Amsterdam who were all trying to make the Tampa flight.  Unfortunately, there wasn’t anyone around to help us reschedule, so we ended up traipsing through the airport for about an hour trying to figure out who could help us (there was an Italian family that didn’t speak much English that we were trying to help as well).  We eventually found a ticket agent, who set us up with rooms at a nearby hotel for the night and booked us on an early flight the next morning.  We checked into the hotel around midnight and had to be back at the airport at 5:30.

Our last day on the cruise was at sea as we were traveling from Katakalon (Katakolo) back to Venice.  I woke up around 6:00 am and couldn’t go back to sleep, so I headed up to the library to do some work. The ship seemed empty at that time – a few people were in the hot tub, probably still up from the previous night, but I mostly saw ship staff cleaning. I grabbed some coffee and watched the sunrise in the library while working on my trip notes and looking at photos from the trip.

We really didn’t do much all day.  Toren and Debi slept in, then we went to breakfast.  At one point we went up to the 11th floor nightclub with Gary and Rosemary and blew bubbles for Toren to chase around, but that was about the extent of our activities.  We spent a good part of the day just getting everything packed up and ready to go home the next day.  It was actually quite nice to have the last day be just a day at sea so we could relax and get ready to go home.

After our last dinner in the nice restaurant we went to another show hoping Toren would do well like he did the previous night.  The show was a magician, Mark Taylor. He was pretty good with sleight of hand tricks, but his total show lasted 20 minutes before he had used up all of his material.  Some of his tricks weren’t even all that impressive if you know how some of them are done (Debi used to date a magician and so knows a lot of the tricks).  We went to bed shortly after the show ended.

We didn’t have to get up as early this morning as our excursion met at 8:15, so we got up at 7:15, which was right about the time I felt like I had slept enough (Toren too). After a quick breakfast, we got our tour bus stickers got on our bus. We drove straight to Olympia and the Olympia Archaeological Site, which is about 30 minutes from Katakolo by bus. There is a modern day city of Olympia, but it is quite small and, like most of Greece, heavily dependent upon tourism with just a few hotels, restaurants, and gift shops. The major attraction, of course, is the ruin of the original Olympic stadium and all of its accompanying buildings – temples, training rooms, Roman bathhouses, etc.

The official start date of the Greek Olympic Games is 776 BCE, but our guide  our guide said that they started before that, possibly as early as 1,000 BCE.  noted early on that the olympic games pre-date the official start date by the Greeks of 776 by about 230 years – so they may have started as early as 1000 BCE. They were held religiously (and I do mean religiously; they were dedicated to Zeus) every four years (with some additional games at other locations around Greece in the off years) until about 393 CE, when Christianity took over the Roman empire and all things Pagan were not only abandoned but outlawed.  Anyway, before anthropologists excavated the ruins, they were completely covered with sand, dirt, and vegetation and, of course, much of the site had been looted. Thus, the adoption of Christianity by the Roman Empire is responsible for the nearly 1,500 year hiatus in the Olympic Games.  A French historian, Pierre de Coubertin, was the founder of the International Olympic Committee and the person who lobbied to bring back the Olympic Games.   His heart is buried in a silver box in the ruins of Olympia.

We spent about 3 hours at the ruins, walking around with our tour guide. Our guide wasn’t great this time. He would stop every 50 meters or so (I’m starting to think in meters after spending 2 weeks in Europe) and drone on and on, repeating himself 4 to 8 times during the course of the tour. Toren couldn’t take the standing around and got antsy, so he and I traipsed all over the ruins well before the rest of our tour group did. We saw the temple of Zeus, which, before the statue of Zeus was taken to Constantinople (probably by the Romans) and then burned (possibly by Christians) was one of the 7 wonders of the Ancient World.  Here’s what it may have looked like before it was destroyed:

The Statue of Zeus at Olympia

Today, all that is left is a ruined temple:

Debi in front of Zeus's Temple

The one pillar you see standing was reconstructed for the Olympic Games in Greece in 2004.  Here’s a panorama of the entire Temple of Zeus:

panorama of Zeus's Temple (click to enlarge)

The Temple of Hera is where the Olympic flame is lit every time there is an Olympic event. That is, of course, a modern tradition started by Germany in 1936 under Hitler and Goebbels for propaganda purposes. There is no constant flame there and, in fact, the alter in front of the temple of Hera is quite modest:

Debi in front of Hera's altar, where the Olympic flame is lit

You can see the Temple of Hera, which was likely the second largest temple after Zeus’s, just behind Debi in the above photo.  Here we are in front of it:

the three of us in front of Hera's Temple

The sculptor of the statue of Zeus, Phidias, had a workshop in Olympia (which was later turned into a Christian church). He is recognized as one of the greatest sculptors of his time.

The most impressive site is probably the stadium, which is quite massive and could have accomodated about 40,000 people. As our guide in Athens noted, the original stadium did not include seats or benches; people sat on the ground. The copy in Athens has benches, but those were added by the Romans. The stadium in Olympia was used for all sorts of races and includes two finish lines, one for men and one for women. I tried to get Toren to run the length of the stadium, but he only made it half way. I walked the rest of it – it’s actually quite far – 180+ meters.  Here are Suzy and Debi at the entrance to the stadium:

Suzy and Debi at the entrance to the Olympic stadium

Here are Toren and I on one edge of the stadium:

Toren and I at the original Olympic stadium (photo by Brent)

And a panorama of the stadium:

panorama of the original Olympic stadium (click to enlarge)

From the ruins, we walked up to the archaeological museum, which contains the statues and other remaining objects from the ruins. The museum has many statues, but many are missing. The decorations of the temple of Zeus are set up roughly as they would have been seen on the outside of the temple, which is pretty cool.  Once again, I had to leave the tour group as Toren was getting antsy, so I did a quick walk through then let Toren run around in the court yard outside. I also picked up some baklava, which was good, but not amazingly different from what I’ve had in the U.S.  Toren and Ethan played for a while in the courtyard, then we headed back to the buses and drove into Olympia for about 15 minutes of shopping. We then drove back to the ship. We could have walked around Katakalon more, but we didn’t want to buy anything else and there aren’t any other particularly famous things to see in Katakalon, so we boarded the ship and ate lunch.

After lunch we took Toren to the pool. He loved it, but we were booted out after about 30 minutes by a pool attendant when they realized Toren wears a diaper. No kids with diapers allowed! And there is no other pool for them. This is kind of annoying considering ½ of the main pool onboard is a wading pool that is about 2 inches deep, and then about 1 ½ feet deep and it is fenced off from the rest of the pool, so it is clearly designed for little kids. But they wouldn’t allow it. So, we left. We then took a nap and went to dinner.

We did make it to the onboard show this night. Debi saw that it was a ballroom dance extravaganza, so she really wanted to try to make it, and given that Toren had been falling asleep around 10:00 pm, that meant he might make it through the show that started at 9:15. So, we went with Gary, Rosemary, Brent, Suzy, and Ethan. Toren made it through about half the show before falling asleep. It turns out the show was pretty good. There were two dancers who seemed like they were probably professional ballroom dancers. The other six (three couples) were decent dancers, but not nearly as polished as the main couple. The singers were also good, but not amazing. Basically they performed a variety of dance numbers set to popular music with ballroom rhythms – chacha, swing, country swing, tango, etc. With Toren out, we went to bed after the show.