City Girl you say?

On September 4, 2010 I decided to do a blog. 

I have spent some pretty good times with family and friends in the great outdoors. Since we laugh almost always and have a great deal of fun together, wouldn't others enjoy me sharing these "good times"?   

I am reading my third book about other people and their experience or adventures in the woods, the getting back to nature and such.  It only seems natural to me that "I can do that".  Wouldn't it be cool to do a "woman outdoors" type of blog. I can write about how this city girl gets outdoors and moves beyond the "eewww Nature, get it off".  So here I am with my blog, typing on a computer, indoors.

Most of my friends are women who apparently really enjoy the outdoors.  Lucky for me, they want to share it. Take Kathy.  She has done some amazing things in the great outdoors, like climbing many of the 4000+ peaks in NH - leaving the house with a backpack larger than her petite frame, loaded with all the appropriate and necessary gear for a February climb...snowshoes, crampons, and three plus layers.  This and that, just in case.  Good grief, I'd be lucky to climb a hill in 60 degrees, carrying just a bottle of water.  Sorry, the weather AND temperature has to be just right.  If I have to take half the house with me, it better be for a cruise or a real vacation.

Not one person would describe me as a princess or girly girl. However, somewhere along the line, I seemed to be given the nickname "City Girl".  Yeah, I am from a city, but not city, city like Boston or New York.  OK, so it's the largest city in our county, but I have been beyond buildings and concrete, lots of times! 

I golf.  That is outdoors. Courses have trees, stinky ponds, mud and BUGS.  I have spent many, many days and nights at the beach, which is outdoors. I have camped...tented in the wilds of a Yosemite campground, spent a few nights in a camping cabin in the Great Smokies, and slept in a tent in torrential rain.  You try not touching the sides in a so called two-person tent that barely had room for one. I call that roughing it!  I have walked in the "woods" in my surrounding small towns, and climbed "mountains" that I later learned are really just very tall hills.  I even fish.  Ok, so I don't touch the fish much, hardly at all really, but I have put the worms on myself. 

What part of that makes me a City Girl? 

Am I a City Girl because I don't like getting nipped at by Black Flies or mosquitos, or having ticks grab hold sucking my blood?  I don't want to hug a tree either, but I have climbed them in my youth.  What's the big deal in wanting a real bathroom? So what if I don't want to be outside in below freezing temperatures or hike in snowstorm?  I'm not against nature, just against frostbite.

This City Girl has actually saved the day a number of times out in the so called wild.  Many escape me since I didn't know I would one day blog about such things. However, last spring my friends decided to camp in a Tipi for a weekend.  Absolutely nothing but a tipi and "nature".  It had been decided that I would join them for the day the next morning because City Girl didn't want to deal with nature in the dark.  I was the hero bright and early the next morning.  Fresh HOT Coffee and donuts were a welcomed treat. I did spend the whole day, and night with them, hiking the trails where the deer and the ticks play and attempting to sleep with nothing to protect us from bears, but a canvas wall.  In the end it was something worth doing at least once.

I don't aspire to be "Mountain Girl" or "Woodsy Woman" either. I am not entirely sure where or when the City Girl nickname came to be mine, especially after all I have done outdoors.  But I do know, the same person that dubbed me City Girl, calls me to get the spider out of the shower.