SUCCESS!!

Kendall and I finally made it backpacking in the park without any major glitches:

• We didn't lock the keys in the car
• We didn't find bones on the ground and freak out about bears and mountain lions
• We didn't run into any illegal bivy campers
• We didn't end up hiking at midnight
• We didn't get hailed on
• We didn't camp in the living room

I'd say that's a pretty good success! We headed out for the trailhead last night around 6:00pm and had camp set up and dinner cooked before dark. We then went on a short night hike and came back via headlamp to cook a chocolate-raspberry-crumble dessert and some lukewarm chocolate. Sitting on our kitchen-rock, Kendall smoked her pipe and I laid down to look at the stars. I saw three shooting stars while looking out. It's funny how sitting somewhere doing something as simple as looking at the sky can bring back happy memories.

When we headed into the tent, I taught Kendall how to play Monopoly Deal (my new favorite game!) and then we realized we had no alarm clock and I needed to be in work this morning by 10am. Finally, I found out that my old-school Ipod had an alarm even though there aren't speakers and set that. Sometime in the night, my Ipod died while I was listening to Mathis der Maler. Luckily, even with a dead battery my alarm went off and we woke up to a freezing 6:00am. The sun wasn't quite peeking up over the trees yet, and we sluggishly headed to our kitchen-rock to make a warm breakfast. We finally got camp packed up and headed down back to the car.

We stopped at the YMCA on the way home so Kendall could where our fishing guys work at Sasquatch. Paris and Andrew were in the parking lot so we pulled in to say hi. Paris saw us and exclaimed how wonderful it was to start the day off seeing two beautiful ladies. We just laughed and thought about how wonderful it is to start the day off hearing that, especially after a night in the backcountry.

Tonight is Ed's for dinner and drinks/trivia after work, then hopefully I will start packing. Well, I guess I started yesterday, but now I can pack all my backcountry gear since I won't be using that anymore this summer. That's a bittersweet thought, but I know I will be back next year, plus Kendall and I are making plans already to camp/hike/backpack in Flag.