Monday, June 11, 2012

Hiking Through Maryland

This morning as soon as we began eating breakfast, the shelter cat came to the tent, laid down on my rain jacket, stretched out its front paws, and began kneading the side of our tent with its paws. I smacked the side of the tent, and yelled, 'No!' just as its claws hit the tent. It backed off right away, and luckily, it did not put a hole in the tent. We kept a close eye on it after that, but luckily, there were other campers to get its attention.
We packed up and hiked just 1.4 miles to a backpacking campground. We had not been to one of these before. There was a big lawn with tent camping, with picnic tables, but the best part is there were restrooms with showers! We all took a hot shower, and then hiked on north.
About 3 miles north, we arrived at the very first Washington Monument, built in 1827. There was a beautiful view from the top.
We hiked on and crossed over I-70 through a pedestrian bridge, and then stopped into a shelter for lunch. After lunch, we stopped in at Annapolis Rocks and enjoyed the beautiful view.
We hiked all day today with Spider and his dad, Shadow. They are spending the whole week hiking together, and it's quite impressive that Spider, who is only 13, is doing such big miles! He is hiking the same mileage as us.
As we got close to the end of our day, we noticed that the shelter we would stay at was only 1.5 miles out of the town of Smithsburg, MD, which had a pizza place. We called Vince's Pizza, and let them know we had 5 hungry hikers, but no car. They came and picked us up in a Jeep. All 4 guys squeezes into the backseat, and put all 5 packs in the back. When we got out of that car, we looked like clowns getting out of a car at the circus!
We had really great pizza AND Mexican food all in the same restaurant, and then he brought us back to the trail.
We have our mattresses and sleeping bags laid out right now at Ensign Cowall Shelter, waiting for the rain to start. There's an 80% chance of rain tonight and tomorrow. We decided to try the shelter experience again, and keep the tent and everything else dry. I'll let you know how that goes! Shadow and Spider are here too, as well as Kindle Ninja. We haven't camped with him in quite a few weeks.
We are camped at mile 1048.4, and we should hit Pennsylvania tomorrow!




















The trail was quite rocky today in stretches ~




Spider and Shadow crossing I-70~






- Steady and F100

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