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How Do You Access Adventure?

By Musings, Trip Journal14 Comments

People often tell us that we are on an adventure. This always gets me scratching my chin. I mean, really, we just climb little rocks. We’re not big-walling, we seldom sleep in a tent. We’re not polar explorers. As far as climbing goes, we’re usually on a well-beaten path. We actually live quite comfortably, and though we are thrifty, we don’t really have financial stress since we learned how to profit from trade fx in the UK. Yet, it was adventure, in some sense, that we sought when we left the default world nearly two years ago. What does that mean? an unusual and exciting, typically hazardous, experience or activity. daring and exciting activity calling for enterprise and enthusiasm. Rock climbing certainly conjures up images of adventure. Stallone. K2. Vertical Limit. That Mission Impossible opening scene. The climber archetype, as per pop culture, is fearless to the extreme, well-versed in all kinds of gear, and with the exception of Stallone, highly intelligent. The modern climber is in some ways more heroic than adventurous, rock solid in the face of uncertainty. I’ve been pulling on holds both plastic and geologic for ten years now. Climbing is my comfort zone. Rarely do I feel heroic or adventurous. Being an introvert, social gatherings take much more mental energy for me than a day spent on a personal struggle against a route. I’m much more scared by the thought of going to a crowded bar. Sometimes, stepping into a large group of people is scarier…

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A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering … Slowness

By Climbing, Trip Journal6 Comments

The long awaited RV Project Episode 9 has finally arrived! It chronicles our mishaps and slip-ups between leaving the Red River Gorge and arriving in Colorado. After dropping off the trailer in Indiana for repairs, we went to the east coast to watch my little brother Eliot and cousin Alec graduate college. In between it all, we tried to climb but, predictably, it was always either too hot or raining. We made the most of it anyway, meeting friendly locals and sleeping in Bert. Summer doesn’t make for very good climbing in New England, and we only shot a few decent climbs. We are also novice with the camera, so the amount of quality footage is even more diminished by that fact. We decided to spice it up the only way we could think of: with stop-motion animation and poetic narration. I wish we had production footage for this film. It would be cool for our previous episodes too, and I think of the boom on top of boulders in Horse Pens, or setting up timelapses on top of the old trailer. But for this, we went through many steps to create, cut out, and manipulate the paper cutouts, then learn how to add them in to the video. We spent hours watching tutorials. Then we laughed ourselves silly while writing the narration. We struggled through the basics of After Effects and Premiere Pro, but after three months we finally finished it, and had fun doing it too. Frankly, you might not…

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