To celebrate, I’m posting my hiking highlights of the past year.
I got a cheap drone December 2021 and most of the clips are from the drone.
My favourite music of 2022 was by Odesza — so it’s appropriate that the soundtrack is one of their songs: Wide Awake.
Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.
I spontaneously flew to the Canary Islands from the U.K.
Flights are cheap.
Weather is great in November. 😎
On arrival I found you couldn’t easily purchase camping fuel. Nor are hiking guidebooks available for sale.
Surprising.
I decided to stay just one week. And only on Tenerife. Reconnaissance.
But I’ll be back.
The best islands for hiking are:
Some of the best hikes require complicated permits. Some are only open on weekends. I’ll need to do more planning next time.
I’m thinking at least 3 weeks. At least 4 islands.
Buy my hiking books online. Book permits well in advance.
November ➙ February look to be the best months.
There are plenty of European tourists. But I didn’t meet even one American or Canadian over a week.
Also, you need to speak Spanglish here.
Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.
P.S.
Once I bought a cheap flight to Lisbon, I found the fuel canister I needed in a hostel FREE BOX. So I know they exist on the Canary Islands.
They MIGHT be for sale from either Leroy Merlin or Decathlon in Santa Cruz, Tenerife. Some have found them at petrol stations and ferreterias, hardware stores.
My goal in hiking is to ENJOY the experience as much as possible.
High altitude mountaineers suffer — the opposite.
I finally got around to watching Meru, the 2015 documentary film about climbing the Shark’s Fin route in the Indian Himalayas.
Mainly because I really admire Jimmy Chin, the best climber of all-time who can ALSO film his adventures.
In 2008 Conrad Anker, Jimmy Chin, and new guy Renan Ozturk almost made the first ascent of the infamous Shark’s Fin. It was harsh. They suffered physically and psychologically.
Before their next attempt in 2011, both Chin and Ozturk (separately) suffered horrific climbing falls. Somehow Jimmy popped out of a monster avalanche suffering barely a scratch.
Watching the movie, everyone agrees Renan should not be going back to Meru. He suffers a minor stroke during the second climb.
Jimmy’s master work was the Academy Award winning Free Solo. (2018)
This one is no Free Solo. But it did keep me gripped from start to finish.
Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.
“Meru is the anti-Everest,” says mountaineer and author Jon Krakauer. “This climb has seen more attempts and more failures than any peak in the Himalaya.”
Krakauer commentary throughout was a highlight for me.
When pandemic cancelled all my travel and Gymnastics coaching gigs, I took the time to improve my video editing. It’s become my main hobby.
Three phases (so far):
After posting my French Creek tribute, I declared I was GOOD ENOUGH at video editing technology for my purposes. I could sit down at a table with a professional video editor and understand 75% of what they were talking about. 😀
Far more difficult is to decide on what story to tell. And to tell it effectively. Many super skillful editors struggle finding their next story.
I threw this short video together quickly as a teaser for my How to Survive the West Coast Trail videos. But in some weird way, it’s evocative of that wild and challenging hike. It tells the story well
I’m particularly happy with the audio.
Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.
Putting these together is incredibly time consuming.
I kept trying to find ways to improve my efficiency. And that ended up evolving into my personal style of video — as of October 2022, at least. Who knows what’s next? 😀
I posted Valencia, Spain in January 2022. My edits today are all similar. But I’m adding more personal drone footage rather than drone stock video.
What is my style?
Challenging for me is finding the right music for each story.
One of my best edits was Norway Highlights. I credit the song — Odesza Higher Ground — as once I decided on the soundtrack, it was easy to decide where to put each clip. In the example, below, the colours are music blocks to be filled with scenes I decide upon later.
Increasingly I’m picking music first, shooting the video later.
Odesza is my favourite band right now. Very popular for YouTube edits.
Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.
What’s next?
I’ve been studying Colour Grading through a course called … Color Grading Academy.
It’s a very complicated process.
Some of the best video editors online send out their final product for Colour experts to finish. An art, not a science.
Things I’ve decided NOT to use:
P.S.
I posted the Englishman River Falls hike in November 2020 and again in October 2022. I’ve definitely improved.
Click PLAY or watch the Nov 2020 edit on YouTube. I was quite happy with it. But NOW I’m wondering what weird colour grade I was experimenting with at that time. 😀
Click PLAY or watch the Oct 2022 edit on YouTube.
I was stuck in Tromsø — the Paris of the north — waiting on my bike and gear which were stuck at Heathrow airport for over 2 weeks. Why not race !!
Tromsø Skyrace was launched 2014 by Kilian Jornet and Emelie Forsberg.
Kílian Jornet is the fastest mountain runner of all time though Karl Egloff has bettered some of Kilian’s records.
Emelie Forsberg is Kilian’s partner, mother of two, and also an insane mountain runner.
I’d like to claim I was in the mix with the sponsored super athletes in this video … 😀
Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.
There are 3-4 different distances raced each year. Mine was shortest.
I signed up 2-days in advance of the race for the EASY 16km up and down.
It was more of a hike than a knife edge ridge.
I ended up 153rd, 1hr 44min behind the winner in the short race. My time 3hr 11min.
BUT I was happy with how I did. Running in I still felt great — avoiding muscle cramps which threatened throughout. I’d not really gone running in over a year before this day.
Louise finished ahead of me. We recovered with free vegetarian chile. So tasty, I bought some to take cycling.
In fact, at that point, Louise was wondering what happened to her brother Henry — turned out he had kept going at the short race turnaround. Henry ended up running an extra 7km or so.
Happily, his luck changed later — winning an official race hoody.
I was quite happy with the DJI OM 4 Gimbal — but somehow lost the magnetic phone clamp.
The magnetic phone clamp is the best feature. The one thing that makes it better FOR ME than competitors like the Zhiyun Smooth Q4. I hate balancing phones on a gimbal. With the OM 4 and 5 you don’t need to.
Rather than pay for a replacement magnetic phone clamp (CAD $35), it was smarter to simply buy the upgraded OM 5 (CAD $149) which includes the phone clamp. I can use the same phone and clamp on either gimbal.
I do feel the OM 5 is slightly better:
The MAIN downside is a shorter battery life than the OM 4. Only about 6 hours.
Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.
I used iPhone 13 on the OM 5 shooting in portrait orientation to keep the footage as SMOOTH as possible. I’d intended to upload it VERTICAL to Instagram and Facebook. Facebook worked. Instagram wouldn’t upload over multiple attempts.
I certainly prefer landscape and YouTube.
BACK to the OM 5 …
Click PLAY or watch the DJI hype video on YouTube.
Click PLAY or watch the DJI tutorial on YouTube.
Here’s the best tutorial I’ve found.
Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.
The following tutorial is more comprehensive.
Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.
I took the train to León where I’d be starting a week long cycling trip to Santiago de Compostela on the French Camino. A pilgrimage people have been doing for over 1000 years.
It’s very walkable, a small city with most of the attractions close together.
León’s Cathedral is one of the finest in Europe.
My official start is this Cathedral. I’ll finish at the Cathedral in Santiago.
León is a great tourist town. I did a lot of cycling there testing the rental bike.
Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.
I can smile again.
After 9 months with a missing upper tooth, I finally got the implant installed June 2022.
Can you tell which upper tooth was replaced?
I never want to get another implant. WAY too expensive. WAY too time consuming.
But I believe they did an excellent job. This tooth should see me out. 😀
I got implant dental surgery November 11th at 11am. #NotChicken
I’ll update this post with details on how it went.
Canadian dentists are WAY too expen$ive.
Nations around the world that cater to “dental tourists” include:
Not Portugal. BUT I wanted to travel to Portugal for hiking and cycling in November. Also, it’s one of the most vaccinated large nations in the world during a pandemic.
Of dentists in Lisbon I looked at online, most impressive was the Institute of Implantology.
Here’s their Dental Tourism page.
I booked a FREE assessment appointment on my birthday:
The last 4 days in Lisbon were in case of complications. And that allows time to adjust the flipper, if needed.
Happily I had no infection nor swelling. And the flipper looks pretty good. Can you tell which top front tooth is now removable?
In fact, I’m as good looking as ever. … Ladies? 😀
I’ll return to Lisbon in 4-6 months to have the permanent fake screwed in.
The Institute of Implantology is not cheap. Price everything included for me will be about CAD $5000 (US$4000, EUR3490). Here are some of the major costs:
The bone graft encourages regeneration of bone and increases the odds that the tooth will stay in my skull for life.
The Institute of Implantology is the second private hospital I’ve used. The other was Shouldice Hernia Hospital in Toronto. Both are excellent. I wish I was rich enough to use more private clinics.
My surgeon was Dr. Gonçalo Caramês. Trained in Los Angeles, he married another dentist. They planned to set up practice in Seattle but he opted instead to return to Portugal because of the pandemic.
The facility itself is impressive. Chic. Very modern technology.
I’d never been to Spain’s 3rd largest city, so jumped on the chance to catch a cheap flight down to the sunny Mediterranean coast.
The historic centre is great.
But the highlight for me was walking and cycle the huge green space that runs through the city.
It was once the river Turia, drained and rerouted after a catastrophic flood in 1957. The old riverbed turned into a picturesque sunken park.
Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.
I did make it out to the beach.
But best was exploring the City of Arts and Sciences.
Click PLAY or watch highlights on YouTube.
I’d always planned to get to the Holy City on foot or by bike.
It’s one of the 3 Christian pilgrimage cities: Jerusalem, Rome and Santiago de Compostela.
Pilgrims have been walking here for over a thousand years to pay tribute to the shrine of Saint James the Great, now the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela.
The Old Town is designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
I’d originally planned to cycle from Porto, Portugal to Santiago. BUT there were no rental bikes available out of Porto. So I arrived (eventually) by bus.
YES I felt like a pretender. Tens of thousands of other visitors look legit — like this guy.
I stayed 3 nights in a magnificent building, Hostel Seminario Menor, one of the most important stops on the Camino.
I got some work done in my monks / College student private room. (19 Euros). And did a LOT of walking around the city.
Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.
Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.
A huge surprise to me was to see a massive ultramodern complex called City of Culture.
It’s impressive. But generally seems to be considered a white elephant, not attracting the numbers of visitors anticipated.
See more architect drawings and photos.
Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.
Rick McCharles 