Kentucy 2012 - Day One

Kentucy 2012 - Day One
By Corey Lablans

It’s dark outside, it’s early in the morning and a pack sits full at the door, the beginning of Kentucky 2012 about to begin. This trip is one of the Queen’s Climbing Club’s most anticipated trips, a week of practicing skills and learning new ones.

Before the excitement of clinging to iron edges on sandstones cliffs, a 15 hour drive lies ahead; some dread the drive, while others relish the road trip experience. Last year’s route took us along the north side of Lake Ontario, down to Windsor, crossing the boarder into Detroit. Crossing the boarder such a distance from Kingston posed a potential risk for stranding individuals, as a result we crossed at Thousand Islands this year.

Across the boarder in swift time, we were on our way, as a new traveler south of Lake Ontario it allowed me see new sites. I’m definitely one of those individuals who relish the road trip experience. When on the road, stopping at fast food places is iconic. Entering new countries, new things are always offered and generally the experience is different. McDonalds was our first stop at around 9:30 am, were I came across pretzels I thought, “pretzels in McDonalds, crazy! They were good.” The remainder of our meals was not to exciting, the typical fast food, and fun times at Wendy’s for lunch and Subway for supper.

No ideas of directions, no desire to look, our van decided to rely solely on the GPS to guide us. As I recall, my dad did set the GPS for traffic avoidance, I’m pretty sure this is what took us on our cross-country tour. The typical route would have taken us down i75, although we ended up taking roads similar to Kingston’s Highway 2. Again as someone who loves seeing new things, this was awesome, saw the countryside and came across a coalmine.

Guitars and harmonicas playing in the back seat, others singing we were nearing our location. During several stages of our backcountry exploration, the question came up if we were we going in the right direction but everything felt right. Going through small villages, one after another, suddenly the sense of familiarity came across, “I’ve been here before?” It was the city of Stanton, a city only 11 kilometers away from Miguel’s Pizza & Rock Climbing. Anticipation rose as we drove the final meandering miles along Natural Bridge Road, we had finally arrived.