Springtime in the “Big Gym”

With warmer spring weather here and thoughts of future beach days running through their minds, many people are heading to the gym to get themselves into bathing-suit shape. Here at Second Paradise Retreat, the onset of spring means that we, too, head to the gym, but it’s a gym – and a workout – of a different sort that keeps us in shape.

Our gymnasium is a large one — 27 acres, to be exact. And throughout the year, wood gathering, splitting, stacking and carrying provide regular exercise, and painting, renovating and cleaning keep many muscles toned. But in the springtime, the gardening and grounds-keeping season begins, and with a full complement of guests in our Nova Scotia vacation rentals, it’s also laundry and housekeeping season.

Many people can easily understand how grounds-keeping activities keep us busy and in shape. But few people consider the muscle-building qualities of the laundry and housekeeping duties that await us. Who needs a weight room or exercise class when you’ve got mountains of laundry to handle?

In the high season (mid-June to mid-September), Katharina does 22 loads of laundry per week. Since we dry all of our laundry on clotheslines, this means that each week Katharina lugs 22 mounds of wet laundry down to the clothesline, stretches up 2 meters to hang all the sheets, towels, rugs and duvet covers, and then stretches up again to remove the dry laundry and bring it back up to the office for folding, sorting and storing. Each load of wet laundry weighs about 13.5 kg, and each load of line-dried laundry weighs about 8.5 kg.

So during those 13 weeks of the high season, Katharina lugs about 297 kg (653 lbs) of wet laundry per week down to the clothesline, and 187 kg (411 lbs) of dry laundry back up to the office. That’s more than a half ton of laundry being carried each week or 6.5 tons over the course of the summer season.

Right now, in the shoulder season, we’re just in spring training, handling a little less than half that amount of laundry per week. By mid-June, those laundry-toting muscles should be fully toned and ready to handle all the sheets and towels our guests use during their Nova Scotia family vacations.

So when people ask what gym we go to and how we stay so fit, we point to the woods, the gardens, and — yes — the clothesline and say, “There’s our gym.”