Books in Real Life, Episode 7: Happiness For Beginners




For this month's Books In Real Life we chose... Happiness For Beginners by Katherine Center! Alexa and I fell in love with this book when we read it a few months ago. It's a beautiful story about one woman's journey to put herself back together again after a divorce. Helen, the protagonist, signs herself up for a wilderness survival course thinking she'll come out of the experience stronger, better and with a clearer sense of what the future holds for her. It's a heartwarming tale that we highly recommend you read and while neither of us would want to sign up for a crazy survival course, we did want to go hiking! Something Helen had to do a lot of. 

On the trail ...

Alexa and I drove to Bear Mountain in upstate New York for our little hiking adventure. I had never been there before but it's such a pretty spot! There's plenty of places to picnic, a lake, ice cream (!) and of course, there's all the hiking you can do.

I've been hiking once before (mind you, I was in 7th grade) but I didn't remember it being so difficult! I admit, I'm seriously out of shape but I also think we took a really difficult path! It was all steep inclines and tons and tons of steps. My body was definitely not happy. But, the views were beautiful.

And of course, the best view was from the very top.

Confession time? We drove to the very top. But we did do some considerable hiking too! Sort of.
This view is breathtaking!
***

Survey time! At the end of every Books In Real Life post, we are going to answer a few questions: 

Anything you wish you'd known beforehand? Even though we knew we were going to Bear Mountain, we didn't do any actual research ahead of time. In other words, we didn't know where to park or where the trail started or if there were different trail options (like was there a super beginner one?). In hindsight, we definitely should've looked into everything!

What was your favorite part? The view from the top (and getting ice cream after our hike). 

Would we do it again? I do want to go hiking again! Just be better prepared next time. 

Driving home! Until next time! :)

1 comment

  1. It was really fun to go on a hiking adventure-slash-road trip to Bear Mountain with you, R! I think it's such a pretty place, and I think they have so many things to do in that area (apart from hiking) that makes it worth a trip for anyone. So glad we did this Books IRL!

    ReplyDelete

with love,

Rachel