August ended up being an eventful month. In many ways differently than I had anticipated. Let’s have a look.

This time, I’ll break two habits tied to the monthly summaries: the usual format where I divide it into a neat section by theme, and that I don’t tend to talk much about my personal life.

To put things into perspective, a bit of background. Those who read my blog for a while know I moved in April 2022 to live on my own. A couple of months in, a woman I see during my morning commute caught my eye. This spring, things got to the point that I was starting to have an actual interest in getting to know her – in a romantic context – which was only the second time something similar happened during my life.

At the beginning of the month, the inevitable happened: I gathered my courage and approached her. Unfortunately for me, I was respectfully declined because she’s not single. More than anything, I felt relief at that point. After all, my largest fear was that I would repeat the mistake of my teen years, when I fell for a classmate but never found the courage to approach her, and it took me years to get over it (and, eventually, led me to start writing).

To clear my mind, I had a bit of ice cream as I got home, then took my stuff and hit the rollerblade circuit, and I kept going around and around until I was totally tired, which took some two hours without just two short breaks.

At the end of the next week, I departed for my week-long hiking holiday. I was feeling more ready than ever, given how much I pushed myself in June and July to be prepared, and the weather seemed to be quite pleasant for the week. Right now, it’s hard to choose one photo out of hundreds as a teaser…

…but there will be a lot more to show as I get to share my story from those days.

Unfortunately, aside from a lot of good weather and hard hiking, it’ll be also remembered by something else – the (so far) biggest mishap of my hiking adventures. I’ll get to the details later, but for now, I can say that the heat became more than I could handle during the sixth day and I ended up needing medical attention, forcing me to skip the 7th and 8th hikes (though those two days turned out to be rainy) and needing a week to recover enough to function normally.

This mishap also had me skip a hike on the weekend after the holidays, so the 6 holiday hikes ended up being the only hiking I did during this month, though they were worth every single step.

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I hope August was nice to you – maybe nicer than it was to me in some aspects, but I guess hardcore hiking has its dangers. There are some nice places I plan to visit in September (and beyond), and I hope the coming autumn will be nice for you as well.