And as fun as it sounded to wake up at the same time I have to get up for my job, it was a small price to pay to be included in the adventure. And to make it to Dan’s by 8 am to carpool, I would have to wake up at 6:30 am to have enough time to get ready and drive over there.
In order to make it to our 10 am reservation for the Incline, we would have to leave town by 8 am. After cracking some jokes, they all admitted to being perfectly okay with it. Since one of the ways I challenge myself is to speak up more, I went ahead and took the risk of asking them if they’d be okay to wear masks in the car. As the guys talked about carpooling, I had that sinking feeling of being the overdramatic-dork who wasn’t totally comfortable with it. So, that measure, along with the other two, each felt like a condom covering the tricky wiener that is being social during a pandemic.īut the idea of driving up together made my social wiener feel exposed again. When I saw an expert on CNN say that being indoors increases the risks of transmission by 19 - 30x (which feels like such a random number), I deemed this as also meaning that being outdoors is 19 - 30x safer.
I would also only spend time with these people outdoors and would still keep a few feet away. I adopted a strategy earlier in the summer of only hanging out with folks who I knew were taking safety measures seriously and limited those they hung out with. Like most of us (but not all), the pandemic really skewed the way I hung out with people. He was very gracious about it and I figured a stair-step hike would be different as it wouldn’t use my legs at such weird angles. Patrick and I had hiked before and I slightly made a fool of myself when I wasn’t able to keep up on the steeper parts of that trail. It would be Dan and I, alongside Dan’s heterosexually handsome roommate and another friend, Patrick.