My Attempt at Winter (Pt.1)
[This is Part 1 of my post about this past weekend spent in Huntsville, Ontario with some friends. I thought I'd break it up since I'm so long-winded and thought you'd be more likely to read through the adventures (which really are fairly amusing) if I could hold your attention in smaller bursts. So, here goes...]
OK, I will be the first to admit that I am anything but a winter person. I greet the first snowfall with a twinkle in my eye, and the second with a guttural groan reminiscent of some animal in pain. I spend most of my days being cold, wrapped in some blanket or sweater, almost regardless of the season. I firmly believe the only place for snow is between December 1 at 12:00 am and December 31 at 12 noon. Anything outside those dates is unwelcome.
I generally don’t participate in winter. Winter sports don’t appeal to me; I’ve always had an insane fear regarding ice — ice skating, walking on ice, any sort of falling motion common when I’m around the stuff. If it’s not cubed and in my glass, I’m not interested. I don’t ski or snowboard, and I have no desire to injure myself learning. I’m a wuss, and I know it.
That being said, this type of loathing is very inconvenient living in Canada, even if it is within the Greater Toronto Area of Ontario, not the “Great White North” which takes up the larger part of this country. As such, husband and I (who also shares my loathing of winter, but not in the same girly-fear way, more of a perpetual-darkness-makes-me-want-to-kill-myself sort of way) decided if we were going to get through this winter (which, by the way, has had more snow than I’ve seen in decades — and I’ve only been around for just over 2.5 of them) we would have to put in some effort and get outside to find the brighter points of this crap season.
Last year we had heard from a good friend about his adventures dog-sledding in Algonquin Park. This appealed to my adventure-seeking husband and we planned at some point in the obscure future to do the same. After a long cold winter, and some half-hearted mentions of getting together with some friends, we decided to plan a dog-sledding trip for sometime in January. What better way to dispel this hatred of winter, we thought, than to fully immerse ourselves in it and change this inconvenient opinion of winter.
And so it was decided, we were off to enjoy a little rustic fun in the woods… in the winter!
To come: the planning, the purchasing, the packing…
