Date: 2011-02-17
To: A little background info on us
Miles today: 0.0

February 17, 2011 Six months have flown by since I actually wrote my last entry.   Now, there is only about a month left before we start hiking. It is hard to believe that all that preparation time I thought I had is now about gone.   We¢ve been working very hard to finalize details and plans over the last several months. However, if things aren¢t in place soon, so be it¢¦we are going to start walking anyway.I imagine that many people who will be reading our journal entries while we are gone will know our backgrounds and where we are coming from. However if you do not, here is where I will try to catch you up. I hail from north central Pennsylvania and grew up in a log house in the country.   My parents both worked in the public education system; my mom as a special education teacher and my father as a school counselor.   The importance of my parents¢ professions lies in the fact that I too enjoy working with children and I believe some of this stems from growing up in the family that I did. My love for the outdoors, adventure, and travel was nurtured by my family from a young age. With both my parents being teachers, they were fortunate to be able to spend many summers sharing adventures with my older sister, Amy, and I. My first camping experience with my parents was when I was three or four at a state park called Kettle Creek (of course I actually don¢t remember this). And then there was the summer, in which I was nine and my sister was thirteen, where we drove across the country, pulling a pop-up camper, to visit national parks and our family along the way. I am sure my parents loved listening to Amy and I bicker in the backseat all 10,000 miles or so. My family has always been an inspiration to me. When my mother, father, and aunt were in their early twenties, they completed a 4,000 mile bike trip from Michigan to Maine and down through Pennsylvania and West Virginia. I am almost positive that my interest and concern for the natural world was impressed upon me from my grandparents. They were real homesteaders in every sense of the word. My mother grew up in southwest Michigan on land that her parents named ¢Eureka.¢ This was about 330 acres that many people would have originally deemed ¢nuttin but swamp,¢ but with an exorbitant amount of hard work my grandparents turned it into an award winning conservation property. They worked with the Soil Conservation Service to dig many ponds for fishing, skating, and wildlife habitat. Miles of fences consisting of thousands of stacked wood pallets (brought home from the factory where my grandfather worked) provided a place for wildlife cover and a base for spreading plant life, as well as a way to keep farm animals in. My grandparents also worked tirelessly to plant native trees and shrubs.I guess when I get fed up along this thru-hike I can either think to myself: my forebears have been able to persevere through self-imposed challenges, I can too, or curse them for fostering this crazy desire in me in the first place! So, I have this longing to be outside, to explore, to be immersed in nature, but why take these 6 months now? Life really is all about timing.   I can¢t count the number of times that people have said to me in reference to the trail ¢I wish I had done that, or I wish I could do that.¢ For me, now is the time to go, before I find myself with too many responsibilities and I am then the one lamenting ¢I wish I had done that.¢ This past December, I finished graduate school where I studied Park and Resource Management with an emphasis on Environmental Education. Previous to graduate school, I spent about 4 years working on and off for various non-profits in the environmental, outdoor, or adventure education field. While, I definitely enjoy the work I have been doing, my career future is completely up in the air right now. Thus, it is a perfect time to go for a walk in the woods with my wonderful boyfriend.Speaking of Tommy, I suppose I better tell you about him now, instead of blabbing on and on about me! Tommy, or Earl, grew up in southeast Pennsylvania, also in the country.   You are probably wondering why he has two names. Well, his first name is Earl and middle is Thomas, so some people call him Tommy and some call him Earl. There really seems to be no rhyme or reason to it and he answers to both. I¢ve asked him why he introduced himself to me as Tommy and not Earl, but he says he doesn¢t know. Tommy, like me, enjoys the outdoors and creating his own adventures. He grew up vacationing in Hatteras, spending time fishing in the surf. Some of his adventures include motorcycle trips up and down the east coast visiting the southern most point in the continental US (Key West) and the eastern most point in the US (Quoddy Head, Maine)and section-hiking most of the AT in Pennsylvania. One of his hobbies is photography and we hope to take many photos capturing our hike. Tommy has had a wide variety of work experiences, including being employed at his family's seafood restaurant,staffing a greenhouse, state park maintenance,being part of a timber-framing crew, and cabinet and counter top fabrication and installation. In recent years, Tommy has been working as a mechanic, often as a manager of a garage.