Date: 2010-09-20
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Miles today: 0.0

Rocks Rocks Rocks Rocks with a side of Rattle Snake. Welcome to Pennsylvania!! Well we are actually half way thru PA. I have not updated in forever and I apologize. Just haven't been anywhere with a computer lately, and my I phone doesn't seem to hold it's charge that long. Right now we are sitting in a shelter waiting out this tropical storm. No hiking today, but luckily it's an enclosed shelter with bunks and is located on a road where we can be easily found by the pizza guy. I didn't sleep much last night even after walking 24 miles, so I stayed ip and finished reading Tom Sawyer. I decided to re-read some of the classics I only read cliff notes for in High School. Started with Frankenstein, finished Tom Sawyer, probably Huckleberry Finn or Mockingbird next.So last we were 3 miles into our day when we happened upon a road with a sandwich shop. I ate two and left out before the others. When I was about 600 feet up a ridge line I heard baby face yelling behind me. I turned to see he didn't have a pack and was running. My first thought was somebody was hurt.....a bad fall, a snake bite, perhaps hit by a car. But than out of breath he started panting......stoker Wolfman....scheming......Delaware water gap......breathing heavily hands on his knees having run a mile uphill. 3 hours later we were paddling down the Delaware river on canoes with food, two 36 packs of beer, 6 cigars and 6 very happy hikers. We traded our legs for oars, ironic because upper body strength is o e thing we haven't got. If you wanna ammuse yourself, go hike for a month than try to do a push up. I did 78 for my PT test right before I came but doubt I could do 20 now. We got fairly tipsy paddling along before we found camp in the moonlight. An over night canoe trip is something I always wanted to do! Check that sucker off my bucket list. Our adventure payed dividends. THREE bald eagle sitings and pictures and video to prove it. At one point a bald Eagle set out from it's perch against a darkening sky.....the whole group started yelling....it's gonna fly across the moon!!! Don't you know I got a video of a bald eagle flying sillouhetted across a full moon!! And the cheers from 6 hikers when it did. Check off from bucket list...watch bald eagle soar. While PA is mostly flat ridgeline walking, it is all rocks. Big rocks, little ones, pointy ones and flat ones with snakes basking on them. I hate snakes...serpents. Have I mentioned that? In the Army they would always brief us on the snake population in places we were going, since as a scout ya kinda share their habitat, always staying low to the ground. They even had little ryhmes to remember whether they were poisonous. Yellow on black, friendly Jack, black on yellow kill a fellow and so on. As If I'm gonna try to recite poetry when facing down a king cobra in Egypt. In my mind they are all poisonous and therefore, I hate them all equally.We can fit all seven of us into a a small smart car, and our packs too. It's insane, we got mad cramming skills. My next update will include a story about our night at a Frat house at Lehigh University, and how a bunch of Frat boys tried to start a fight with us, and how I gave one of them a trip to the hospital........j/k got ya momma!! LolLiving my dream....