Date: 2004-04-18
From: Va. 623

To: USFS 222/VA 625
Miles today: 10.8

This is Cindy, it's Sunday April 18th, we got up a little before 7 am from car camping and Billy had made breakfast for the work crew, eggs and pancakes, it was really good. Had some difficulty getting to sleep in the car last night but finally slept well. Finally we all got ready with 5 vehicles in a convoy, took off for USFS 222/VA 625, for the Sundays work detail. The convoy was Billy in front, followed by Carol from New York, Harry in a rented Focus, us in our minivan and Bobby bringing up the rear. Coming over a mountain we notice that Carol had a flat tire in front of us. We kept driving and we couldn't get her attention to pull over. Eventually we could smell rubber burning. We are driving right behind her for a long way, and then noticed our car was smoking, so we pulled over. Our brakes had got overheated coming down the mountain road, so we let them cool off 5 minutes. We caught up with the gang a few miles ahead, where Bobby was fixing Carol's flat tire, with the small spare. She went into town to get her tire fixed while we went to work/hike. We dropped the cars off at USFS 222/VA 625 and somebody drove us around to virginia 623 (garden Mt), to start work/hiking a little after noon. You get some great views of Burks garden. I got hungry after an hour or so, we stopped and had a quick lunch. We passed Trail light and Rainbow Brite and Drifter. It seems like it might be 4 o'clock when we started to climb Chestnut Knob mountain, finally got up there for the fantastic views, it might have been 5:31 up at the Chestnut Knob Shelter. We did a little work there.Didn't stay very long, but talked to one hiker, Hog Walker. He couldn't decide if he should stay at the shelter, because it was so beautiful there. All day we've had the beautiful view of Burkes garden with the mountains behind it and Mount Rogers. We continued on down a huge meadow on a beautiful day, finally getting back into the woods. We came out about 15 minutes before the sun set deadline.  Talk to a guy with a husky with blue eyes and he has blue eyes, matching eyes. Finally made it out to the cars on USFS 222/VA 625 at 8 pm. Maybe the latest time we've ever walked out of the woods. Getting back to the car was not the end of our evening. We offered to take Bobby and Billy back to their truck campsite at Appalachian trail crossing on VA 42. We planned another hike with the Piedmont trail gang tomorrow.Carol was waiting there at Billy's campsite,wondering what time we would finally get back from our hike. By then it was 8:45 pm and we took off to get our other car back on Virginia Highway 623. It was a beautiful evening drive with great star watching, and we finally got back to the VA 42 campsite at 10:30 pm. Carol was there talking to Steve with his collie dog, Mr Luke. Billy and Bobby were not back yet from supper at a Dairy Queen on Interstate 77. We had a picnic table at our campsite for our supper. Bobby had picked up supper for us at the Dairy Queen, cheeseburgers and fries. Carol had some snacks and chips and dip, it was all fantastic. We crawled in the minivan at 11:30 with a tub of water and a wash rag to clean up with. Got to sleep around midnight.