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¢Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by things you didn't do than by the things you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover."~Mark Twain   I guess I have to put in my official post hike entry. It has been almost two months since the five of us climbed Katahdin. What has happened since I returned home and to ¢real¢ life, though I use the term ¢real¢ very loosely! How, or have I, adjusted to civilization? Yes and no and some of what I find myself doing is quite funny, at least in my mind. For starters, I have yet to sleep in my bed. I find the floor a much better place to sleep and I just toss down the ol¢ sleeping bag. I do use my pillow! I still use the ¢baggie¢ wallet that we use on the trail. Not that I have to dig into it that often but I have gotten a couple of looks when people have asked for ID and I pull out the ziplock! TV, I used to be a news junkie and I would always have the TV on even if I wasn¢t watching. Now, I rarely turn it on and the shows I used to think were cool just don¢t appeal to me anymore. I am seriously thinking of canceling my cable service. Why pay for it if you don¢t use it! As I have mentioned before, you don¢t pay attention to dates and days on the trail. I still don¢t pay attention to the date and always have to ask what the date is. I do have to pay attention to the day because I am employed. Yes, I am in the work force. Gotta work to get money for the next adventure! That adventure begins next May and it is not what was originally planned. Logistics (i.e., money) will not allow the Camino to be done next year. Oh sure, we could do it, but if you are going to go to Spain you want to have a little more than a meager bankroll! We have decided on a different adventure. I say we, because the we, include Touk and Tink. You meet a lot of people on the trail. You also meet special people who you know you will keep in contact with and they will with you. There are a lot of those people that I am in contact with but these two are a bit different. We are in constant communication, via email or phone, several times a week. We have helped each other, and still are, through the adjustment period. We, though it tends to be them ganging up on me, tease each other constantly. Believe it or not, they think I need watching! I am a bit older than they and they think I need watching! J When it was decided that we couldn¢t pull off the Europe trip the plan evolved into a Trail Magic/Maintenance/Hike plan. Something we could afford and something that would be a blast to do. It is going to start out at Trail Days in May. Touk and I will hook up there and from there we plan to work our way north along the trail. We will stop at some of our favorite spots from last year. We will stop and do trail magic at various gaps. We will do a few days of trail maintenance. In other words, it will be about 6 weeks of giving back to the trail. Paying back what was given to us and what we so appreciated this year. By the end of June we plan to be in NH where we will pick up Tink, who will have returned from her six-month teaching expedition to South Africa. From there we will head back to the beginning of the Long Trail. Yes, we are going to do the Long Trail. We actually did almost 100 miles of it this year. It runs along the AT until Maine Junction and then branches off. Part of our discussion consisted whether we start where we split off or if we go SOBO on it. I think Touk pretty much said it all, ¢I¢ll do whatever you two want to do, as long as it is the whole thing and NOBO!¢ So, it seems we will do the whole thing starting from the south ¢¦ No stinking SOBO stuff here! We used to give the SOBO¢s such a hard time when we would run into on the trail this year. All in good fun. Of course! That is we are committed to. This one is doable and it will be my plan. If things change with the girls (nothing WILL happen, right Touk? right Tink?) I will still be out there and there will be a journal for it. Not just for the hike portion but also for the six weeks prior to the actual Long Trail. I am pretty jazzed about this plan. There are a lot of good people out there I want to see again and this will allow it to happen. I also have been trying to get my photos updated. Some of you may have seen days where I have edited the journal. If you do, it means that I have put up more photos, in the picture section and into journal entries themselves. This seems to be a bigger task than I figured. I am dating the photos so I have to find the entry near, or around, where I took the picture. I still have 7 more cameras to develop! I am doing a couple a week. There has not been a day that I do not think about the trail and the time I spent out there. I miss it so! It has changed me, changed me in a way that some people I know here may not understand or even see. My life now consists of working for the next adventure! There are a lot of things that I used to think were important and now I realize that they weren¢t all that important. Makes me laugh. I sent a message to Tink the other day and part of it included these thoughts.¢We don't have to have a smile that comes from an outside source all the time, because we have one on the inside. We can have a special smile because we have done something very, very, few people have done ... walked for miles on end and lived life the way it was meant to be. With this in our heads we always have a spot we can go to. A spot where we can enjoy the memories. We can enjoy the good times, the miserable moments and everything else. This spot will always provide a smile, one way or another. It's the little things that make up a life. The little smiles that make us happy.¢