After a fairly good night of sleep, I do the final 3 miles in Lake Morena which has a very nice campground with showers. When I was doing my training I met a couple and one piece of advice from them was to shower every chance you get. Never pass up a chance for a shower. So, I wandered into the campground and took a nice luke warm navy shower and I felt terrific. Ready to go and so I did. The terrific feeling did not last very long for some reason and it was not long until I was just dead tired and traveling very slow. By the time I had gone 9 miles I found myself at Boulder Oak Camp Ground (very close to interstate 8) and was thinking of stopping. However after resting there for about an hour and having an almost cooked meal I decided to go on. Let me explain the almost cooked meal. For the longest time, I was not going to take a stove on this trip at all. I was going to eat trail mix while on the trail and just have hot food on Sunday and on Saturdays when I was in civilization. However, I was convinced by Mark from Church that I was insane. I needed to have a stove and something other than trail mix. After some thought I did relent and bought a pocket-rocket stove and some food I could cook along the way just by putting boiling water into a pouch of food and waiting. How hard can that be? This pocket-rocket can boil a cup of water in 60 seconds!! So I set this up and put the water in my cup and fired up the rocket and watched and watched and watched…. nothing… I put my finger into the water and it was still cool… I know that sometimes there are exaggerations in marketing but we were going on 5 minutes and nothing. Finally after 10 minutes and turning the rocket up to full throttle I was able to get bubbles on the bottom of the cup and the water was warm. So I just used the warm water and put it into the pouch and waiting the amount of time specified for the cooking to happen. This was a vegetable-noodle dish and the vegies were OK but the noodles were still crunchy. When I bought the cup I just bought the one that was the right size and was the lightest one I could fine. Taking a close look at the cup, it says “double walled” on it. It is an insulating cup and not a cooking cup!!! By the way, it does a GREAT job at insulating. There was not way that water in that cup was every going to boil. When I got to Mt. Laguna, I bought a new cup and everything works just as advertised now. After eating and resting I decided to keep going and went on another 4 miles or so. Of course those last 4 miles were all up hill and an increase of 1000 feet in elevation. Why is a mountain always in the way? This would be much easier if it actually was the Pacific Coast Trail. Along the way, I met another nice and very young couple, Crow and Brett. They were way faster than I was and we passed each other twice only because Brett seemed to have some issues with blisters. Once they passed me for the last time I have never seen them again or seen their names. I learned on this day that Lenora had an accident after dropping me off on Monday but did not want to tell me until we could talk. I had called her while at Boulder Creek and so I was told. She was OK she said and I should not stop or do anything crazy. I was not so sure, crazy is in my nature. Since I was going to take Friday, Saturday, and Sunday off for a spiritual weekend (Cursillo), I decided to take Thursday off as well and make sure Lenora was going to be ok.

Lenora’s Note:
I had been struggling with how to tell Don about the accident and just did not know how to describe it in a note. When he called the first thing he told me was that he had been praying the Chaplet Of Divine Mercy for me as he hiked all day yesterday. I knew then that I could tell him and remind both of us that we are not alone on this journey. God is good (all the time 🙂 ). It was good to be able to reassure him that I am well and I spent this day resting and recovering.