Gabe Dalrymple

Last days before school….

Well, school is right around the corner, and it certainly feels like it, with orientation, tryouts, a final track meet, and the constant personal reminder that I’ll be waking up super early, and getting to sleep late after soccer. But there’s always the thought of winter, and more importantly, snowboarding. Let’s see, back to the past now. What have I done recently? Well, continuing from where the last post left off, I did get to go to the Boulder Road Runners Summer Track Meet with my friend Calvin, and although I was too late to run the 100m, and it started raining, I had a great time.

I jumped 5’2 in the High Jump, as you can see above, and jumped 17’6″ in the Long Jump, a new PR. Unfortunately, I got put in lane 1 in the 200, and ran the worst race of my life (28 seconds, compared to 26.6 (still mediocre) from earlier this year). Discus was pretty difficult, mostly because it was raining, my discus was slippery, and the discus ring (is that what you call it?) was partially filled with water.

I did get to read Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, which I finished in about 3 hours. On my mom’s birthday, we went to Denver and had a great time, as it was raining and we couldn’t hike a fourteener on the day of her birthday.

YoYo Night was extremely fun to go to again, Isaac performed again (inside this time, because of rain), and we had some friends show up. Here’s a few short clips from that edited together by me, and published on Isaac’s YouTube Channel.

We didn’t really do much for the next week, so I’ll skip over that. The next notable event to take place in our life was backpacking up to Wheeler Lakes up near Copper Mountain with some friends, and staying overnight. It was a great time, although we didn’t get to see the meteor shower, and it was pretty cold during the night.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot! Actually I didn’t, I just wanted to start the paragraph like that. But anyways… I made the Summit High School Junior Varsity soccer team! Tryouts wore me out, especially with my knee hurting a ton (from not using the right muscles, according to Axis Sport Medicine), but I got through all three days of it, and made it on the team. I wish I had a picture of that, but they don’t want any parents watching the practices, period. The best I have is this:

Now that I’m on the team, it’s not an easy ride the whole season. I have practice every day, and a game every Tuesday and Thursday, plus a few on Saturdays. My first game is a scrimmage on Saturday against Eagle Valley near Vail. This team seems solid, and my hope is that I can do my part and score some goals.

Yesterday I got to meet my school counselor, Ms Finley, who not only read my blog, but noticed that I mentioned that I was not particularly excited to be attending school. Not that my position on that has changed, but with the addition of soccer I have something to look forward too in the fall (and also something to somewhat dread, as I notice myself constantly thinking about the suicides I’ll have to run…). Well, Ms Finley helped me sort out which classes to take, and for that I’m grateful. Today I went to orientation, which was a bit pointless as Ms Finley had already summed up pretty much what they told me today…. 😛 On the bright side, I got to see a lot of people I hadn’t seen in a while, and that was cool to say hi and tell them that I’m going to school.

That about sums up everything that’s happened since last post, and since I want to finish Algebra II soon, I’ll be getting back to that.

Settling Down?

Well, we’re back in Breckenridge, Colorado. Again. It seems like somehow we always get back here, no matter what. And now, we’re here for good. Possibly. Hopefully not. I like traveling, a lot more than staying in one spot forever. My family has been saying we’ve settled down in the best place to settle down in the country, and I can see that. Out of all the places we’ve traveled to, I’m not sure I would want to “live” anywhere else.

We’ve been pretty busy, but it’s all been fun. Isaac, Jadyn and I participated in another tennis tournament in Boulder, CO, which was my second tournament ever. It was pretty fun, and it was good to get in some matches with other kids my age.

Isaac and I have been doing “YoYo Night” at YoYoLoco in Breck with the owner Mark every Saturday, and that’s been going for the past two weeks. We learned a lot from some competition-level YoYo players last weekend, and are definitely looking forward to next Saturday.

Woodward Barn at Copper has been open for drop-in sessions on weekends for the summer, and we’ve gone a couple of times so far. I got some new tricks down, and it’s been a ton of fun to be back jumping on the trampolines there again. Here’s a video of a gainer I did at the Barn!

I’m going to be going into my freshman year of High School at Summit High School, here in Breck, the first time I’ve ever gone to school. Everyone here always asks me “Are you excited? Or nervous?”. My answer always is, no and no. I’d rather stay homeschooled, but I came to the conclusion that a High School diploma would be beneficial to my foreseeable future. I’m not really nervous at all, it’s not really going to be that big of a deal, except for the fact that I’m going to have to wake up at around 5:45 every day…. That sucks. And that’s not really nerve-wracking so much as annoying.

Hopefully, I can write about my school experiences, and post it here, just like I did with track. It’s always fun to write and exercise my vocabulary skills, typing skills, writing skills, listening to music skills, and the #1 least important (and my favorite) skill (besides all of them), humor. Now, you may be asking “Hey Gabe, why isn’t there any humor in your recent posts?”, and my answer to that is the following invisible paragraph:

(Paragraph is here, but you can’t see it :P)

No, really, I should start upping the humor levels in my posts at least a minimum of 1%, otherwise people might start to think I’m not humorous. But seriously (not really seriously), I think that I’ll start just writing on here more, and maybe I’ll do an essay, just cause. Although, maybe not, cause I’ll probably be doing a lot of those for school anyway. But you never know.

I’ve got a track meet tomorrow, one in Boulder, that I’ve been planning to go to for the past few months. Hopefully I run okay, as my knee has been giving me some pain recently (We went to Axis Sports Medicine and they told me that I’ve been using my knee in the wrong way, and I need to strengthen some parts of my leg (At least, that’s what I took away from it)). I’m looking forward to it, and hopefully I can High Jump over 5′, run the 100m in under 13 seconds, long jump over 17′, and set a new PR in discus (maybe even over 100′?).

I think I’ll end off the post there, mostly because it’s 10 PM (one half of me is telling me “Come on, you can write 3 more paragraphs!”, and the other is saying “Go to bed!”). I’ll probably write about our adventures in between Sedona and getting back to Breck tomorrow. So, thanks for reading, and subscribe to the blog for more updates on my life!

3 Amazing Years – Introduction

Note: Well, I wrote this about a month ago, a few days after our July 16th “freejourner anniversary”, the day we originally left Austin, TX and started traveling. It didn’t really turn out the way I wanted to write it, but I figured “Why write this whole thing if I’m going to just keep editing it and never publish it?”.

Location: On the road to Breckenridge, CO

Geocaches: 363 (It’s funny how I always used to write those two things)

3 years and one month ago, Dad notified us that we would be leaving our neighborhood and house in Texas to travel the country on amazing adventures. We had one month to sell everything off that we couldn’t travel with, clean the house, prepare for traveling, and tell all our friends.

3 years ago, we had just finished selling everything off, packed up our car for the first time, and drove out of Austin, Texas to start what would be an amazing journey.

My final picture with my friends in Austin before leaving.

Back then, I never knew I would be eventually be competing in the 2016 USASA Snowboarding National Championships, or running track (I’d never even heard of high jump!), or that I would backpack in the Sierra Nevadas and Channel Islands, or that I’d we’d get into YoYoing (of all things!), or that we’d see old friends and meet new ones across the country.

DCIM100GOPROGOPR1393. — My final picture with my friends in Austin before leaving.

Even before we started traveling, we had a very potentially mobile lifestyle. We were all homeschooled, and Dad could work from anywhere. In leaving, schooling didn’t change much. The hard part was leaving our friends. Initially, when we left, we thought it would only be for a year. Welp, that didn’t happen, obviously. We’ve been back to Austin a couple of times, and it’s been enjoyable to see all our friends and catch up with them. In 2014, we came back to Austin for 3 months. That was the first time that we had come back since our departure. We totally surprised all our friends and freaked them out by knocking on their doors.

I remember telling my friend Sage “Hey, are you at your house?”, and him asking “Why” (without the question mark :P), and I just gave him a dumb answer something like “Uh… So we can play Minecraft together on August 24th, 2014 at 2:30 PM, of couse”. Somehow he didn’t suspect anything, and he completely freaked out with excitement when we knocked on his door, as did all our other friends still living in our old neighborhood. After we had gathered everyone, I took everyone out to the 7-11 we always used to go to, and told everyone about our travels.

We got to have my 13th birthday in Austin, with all my friends and family, which was, to say the very least, memorable (or a little next to the very least, because I can think of a few words that are less than memorable. Just pointing that out :P).

After we left, it was straight off to Colorado again for another snowboarding season! Our first season with Team Summit, and a season where I feel I progressed exponentially (like Snowboarding Skills^1 :P. Just kidding), with learning new tricks, getting introduced to boardercross, and learning more about snowboarding in general.

This was when my love for track was born. When spring came, I got signed up for track and field through Summit Middle School, and while I won’t go through everything that happened (because I have quite a few posts from before that detail my first track and field season), I will say that I got hooked on sprinting, competing, and most importantly to me, high jump. I really don’t know why jumping over a bar over and over again is enjoyable to me, but then again, when you put all track and field events into perspective like that, I guess they’re all a bit strange in their own way (Shot put = Throwing a metal ball as far as you can, Long Jump = Running and jumping into sand, Triple Jump = Running and jumping three times into sand, Pole Vault = Launching yourself into the air over a bar using a pole, 100m = Running as fast as you can for as long as you can, etc. :P)

In November 2015, we returned to Austin once again, this time just for ten days. It still was an amazing time (I should really stop using the word amazing. Time to go search for synonyms! Well, after I finish writing this “amazing”-filled post.), and we got to have many more memories with our friends than if we wouldn’t have gone there (well, that last part was kinda obvious, but I needed something to write while I think of the next paragraph, just like I’m doing right now!).

This last snowboarding season was probably my favorite, because I met new kids, got to learn new trampoline tricks at Woodward Barn at Copper Mountain, and most importantly (unless I can think of something more important right now. Nope. Carry on), competing at the 2016 Snowboarding National Championships. I raced a lot during the season (I think it was in total around 12 days on the course), and it was enough to get into nationals. Placing 42nd wasn’t the best, but it wasn’t the worst, so I’m pretty happy with the result.

Track and field was a bit worse this season, as I got statistically worse in high jump, and I never won any event (except one 4×100 win, if you count that). On the bright side, I got to run, jump and throw again.

We’ve been staying in Sedona, AZ for the past month, and it’s been a blast. We started in a week-long Nike Tennis Camp, which was an amazing time. We played for 7-8 hours every day, and definitely improved our game. I got to high jump a lot more, because I found a high school with a high jump pit, and I definitely improved in that too. I cleared 5’2″, and I think I’ll be ready for this next track season, especially with the upcoming all-comers meets I’m planning on running.

Now we’re on the way back to Colorado, bringing our trip to a close. It’s crazy to think of all the places we have visited, all the mountains we’ve snowboarded, all the sports we’ve played in different places, and all the new friends we’ve met. I’m going to continue this in another post, detailing all the places we’ve stayed. Well, I better get to writing that now, so I’m going to finish off this post saying goodbye!

Leaving Sedona!

Well, we’ve been staying in Sedona, AZ for about a month, and it’s almost time for us to leave. We’ve been here for a month, and it’s been a crazy, fun filled month.

When we first arrived here, we instantly were thrown into the action with a Nike Tennis Camp, which was an amazing experience, and I think improved my game a ton. We played for 5 days in a row at Enchantment Resort here in Sedona, playing for 7 hours a day. So much fun!
We rented an amazing house, which I consider one of the best we’ve stayed in on our travels, I guess because of the openness and the fact that I got my own room. Our house even had its own rooftop balcony-thing, where at night you could see the entire night sky, the Milky Way and tons of stars. One night, Isaac and I even slept out there (well, at least until 4:30 AM… :P)

Tennis was a big part of our stay here, and we probably played 25 out of the 30 days we were here. Every evening after the heat receded with the sun, we’d go out and play on some public lighted tennis courts till the lights went out, which was 10 PM.

We hiked some amazing places here, such as Bell Rock or Devil’s Bridge. We got to rent a Jeep and went on a Jeep trail, which was intense because of all the rocks and bumps, which I guess we weren’t used to.

One day, we took a trip out to the YoYoFactory Headquarters in Chandler, Arizona, where we met the co-founder, Hans, got a tour and saw MANY, MANY awesome YoYos. It was a great time, and I knew that was one place I’d wanted to go to ever since I figured out it was in Arizona.

A giant plus for me was that I found a high school with a track…. And more importantly, a high jump pit! I cleared 5’2″ after many attempts, and I jumped 17′ at the long jump pit. I went out there as much as I could, because I don’t know when I’m going to get to do that again. I ran a good amount while I was here, doing an out-and-back run to the end of the town, which in total was about 2.5 miles.

Well, we’re nearing the end of our traveling, and we’re going to be back in Summit County in a week and a half! But until then, it’s off to Las Vegas, Nevada, and St. George, Utah again!