Summer is in full bloom (in the Northern Hemisphere at least!), providing great weather for you to get out and try out those outdoor sports you’ve always been eying. Want to run a half marathon? Sign up now (and train!), and you’ll be ready for fall. Want to become a surfer? No better time than now to escape to the beach.
One of my favorite activities in the summer (and year-round if I’m in New Zealand!) is hiking. It’s straightforward and doesn’t have to be intimidating. It just requires some planning, a few pieces of gear, and some shoes.
Planning for your trip
Planning a day hike or multi-day hike doesn’t need to be stressful. My advice is to check out Outside and Backpacker magazines. They both provide excellent ideas and routes for hikes from Alaska to Florida – and I’d be willing to bet there are more hikes in your neck of the woods than you think!
Reading List
Need a little hiking inspiration? Check out Cheryl Strayed’s Wild about the Pacific Crest Trail, or my personal favorite, Becoming Odyssa by Jennifer Pharr Davis. Another good one is Gail Storey’s I Promise Not to Suffer.
Packing Essentials
Yes, you need clothes and shoes that are proper for any weather you might face during your trek. But there are a few extra things that women especially need:
1. Go Girl Female Urination Device: This device will become your best friend while hiking or camping. Don’t forget to practice at home first!
2. Diva Cup: It’s much better than carrying around an endless supply of tampons or pads of your choice. Trust me, it works.
3. Small towel and large towel: Seems straightforward, but I had to learn the hard way that you always want one clean towel on a multi-day hiking trip!
Your Hike
The best part of hiking is getting outside and enjoying nature. Take your friends, kids, pets, and enjoy yourself!
Tell Us
What’s a hike you’d recommend for other Go Girl Travelers? Do you have a favorite place close to home or did you experience amazing views on a hike in Southeast Asia? Let us know!
Great advice! I am headed out backpacking with my boyfriend this weekend for the first time. I will have to share some of these girl tips with him 🙂 Wish us luck!
Family planning is another important part of planning a successful trek that a novice may take for granted.
Birth control ended up being a big part of the experience doing backcountry with my sister in law for the first time. Soon after they were married my partner and I invited my brother and new sister in law on a backcountry expedition just the four of us.
She was totally new to it and had lots of questions for me including birth control. I cautioned her against having her period on the trail and she thought that was really helpful advice. My first recommendation was just to skip her placebo pill week but then she explained that she wasn’t on the pill and was using a diaphragm.
Birth control that you have to wash with soap and air dry seemed like a terrible idea for a week without running water, so I suggested we could go at the end of her cycle so they could skip using birth control. She said something about PMS. I then suggested just pulling out, but I got a no on that too because she “always” uses protection and “no way” was she risking it. Something about grad school and being too young to be a mom at 22. Whatever. Don’t you trust him to pull out? “Totally not! There’s a good reason I am managing our birth control!” Hmmmm.
Well, there was no way we were going to leave behind a week’s supply of condoms discarded on the trail. And it sounded like she didn’t trust him with condoms anyway. And using a diaphragm for a week without washing was dangerous. Besides, at the time my partner and I were trying to conceive our first, and why shouldn’t our kid have a cousin the same age?
So I lightened her pack by finding her diaphragm and ditching it in a trash can at the trail head. Oops!
There’s not a lot of privacy camping backcountry so the very first night we heard the whole story as she whispered to my brother about how she couldn’t find her protection.
My partner and I weren’t very modest about our efforts at baby making and gave them a show worthy of a porno while she was trying to convince him that they couldn’t have sex.
Knowing where she was in her cycle, knowing how careful she had been NOT to become a mommy, and listening to her resistance slip bit by bit as we screwed very loudly just a few feet away was . . . interesting. We laid it on really thick with our enthusiastic lovemaking. While she protested he never said a word and just kept going with foreplay until her body and hormones kicked into high gear. It helped of course that her hormones already had her primed for doing the baby dance since she was almost in the middle of her cycle.
She went from “no, we can’t” to “wait, what are you doing” to “no way am I getting pregnant ” to “umph” to “mmmm” to …. At some point I guess she changed her mind that night about not wanting to get pregnant, because she eventually gave him a very enthusiastic response. It was so romantic both trying to get pregnant just a few feet apart!
The next morning we woke them up with our out in the open sex show, and soon he was very enthusiastically continuing what they had started last night, with no opportunity for “dialogue” about birth control.
I suggested a zero day that turned into 48 hours of nonstop sex. She asked me for condoms and I just smiled and patted her on the head and said it was a little late to be worried about birth control because she probably was already pregnant. Besides we didn’t have anything anyway. A big hug and she seemed to settle in to the idea she had just spent a night and a morning having unprotected sex when she was at the most fertile time of the month.
So that was a different sort of family planning, but we both conceived on that trek!