Thursday, October 30, 2008

The Rock that was Castle

Yesterday we were scheduled to finish up our shoot around 3ish and had decided that we would try and get some hiking in afterwards. But it was 3 and we had driven away from the mountains for the location so we were trying to figure out where to go and how to fit in maximum fun-mountain-y time with only 3 hours of daylight left over.

The people we were interviewing recommended this place called Castle Rock and without really asking a lot of questions (that one’s on me) we headed off to find it. They had said there was some climbing and a bluff and a castle that was shaped like a rock. I mean, that’s all I need to spell out a good time.

I didn’t really know how to get there so I just started driving down a highway (with vinnie and rich following) and then when we got to the tollbooth, I asked directions. Oops – needed to be going south, not north. Gotcha. Turn around, pay the toll again.

So we drive for awhile, we’re not really seeing anything, getting a little discouraged but feeling mavericky and discovery. Annmarie was playing cracked out dj, flipping the station every 5 seconds in order to fully engage our rocking out abilities over a wide spectrum of musical choices.

We finally reach the town of Castle Rock and smack in the middle there’s just this random giant rock. We circled the thing twice to figure out if this was the actual Castle Rock and then circled two more times to figure out how the heck to even walk up it. It was basically a bluff with a rock – we had just driven almost an hour to find this darn thing and this is it??

Whatever, we’re here, let’s do this thing.

We were wearing far more appropriate footwear this time.

We park and start walking up and it’s a nice walk, nothing fancy - and then we start feeling a little frisky. First of all, Vinnie decided that he wanted to grab the camera so he runs back down to the car but tells us not to wait because we’re girls and we’re slow and he’ll catch up before we reach the top.

So that prompted Annmarie and me to start running. We came to this little cut off that was pretty steep but was also kind of sandy and slippery. Annmarie climbed up it first and we took some pics and then I ended up scrambling all the way to the top of it for some unknown reason and of course felt all proud of myself. Like – REALLY proud of myself.

Little did I know that little climb was just the tip of the iceberg for the day...

So we all make it to end of the path eventually; there’s not really anyone around so we’re not quite sure what people do up here. We can see the top of the rock way above us, but there’s no clear way on how to get up there.

Maybe it was the mountain air that was making us high, maybe it was just that we were all feeling great because this shoot has been so easy or maybe we all just went a little crazy because we’re all a little crazy. Whatever it was, Vinnie started scaling the rock to get to the top and one by one, we all followed suit.
It was incredible.

And holy crap!!! We scaled a giant freaking rock!

At first Vinnie went up and I followed him up but then kind of chickened out because I couldn’t figure out for the life of me how I would get back down. (my first attempt)

So I come down and Rich goes up after Vinnie. Annmarie and I kind of stand there trying to figure out how we’re gonna join in the fun too when Vinnie starts heckling us to climb up by saying “there’s like a THOUSAND people up here!”

Sure enough, this pack of high school kids appear at the top of the rock to climb down. Two of the girls are wearing flip-flops – which, talk about inappropriate footwear! I made a crack about the flip-flops being very silly to wear while scaling a mountain and the girls just kind of smirked at me.

That is until she broke her toe on the way down!

We were climbing up when we heard some commotion right below us and sure enough, she had caught her toe, bent her nail back and broke her big toe because of the flip flops getting caught on the rock. Vinnie and Rich, being all chivalrous and stuff, immediately climbed down to help her. It was such a typical high school scene. Her girlfriends were all concerned and the bonehead boys she was with just stood there looking dumb and being very unhelpful.

Annmaire and I decided to follow the bonehead boys suit and leave the ER scene behind us. We climbed right up to the top .. ALL BY OURSELVES!

Omg – totally worth it. It was just stunning. We decided to celebrate with a few yoga poses.


And then being total video geeks, we proceeded to take a slew of pictures to document our journey…. And create more awesome album covers.

Ok - so going down was way scarier than climbing up....

Who knew Castle Rock would actually rock?!?!

On a separate note, earlier in the day, we took a lunch break during our video shoot and Vinnie tried to convince us that there such a thing as a blueberry shake. Annmaire wasn’t buying it.

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