So what happened between April 8 and April 13 and what happened to miles 42 and 77? Well, I had already planned for a religious seminar for part of this time and decided to take an extra day off to be with Lenora and find out how she really was doing and if I was even going to continue. Turns out she is a trooper and did not want me to stop and convinced me that everything would be fine and the religious seminar (Cursillo) was fantastic. So then the decision was to pick up where I left off OR to pick up where I should have been. This was an easy decision for at least this time because I miles between 42 and 77 I have already done in training last year and it is pretty important I keep to my schedule in order to be able to take Sundays off and get to church.

Mile 77 starts at Hwy 78 just east of Julian and is an interesting start. You immediately start zig zagging up the side of the mountain and after hiking for about an hour and you look down and you have not made any headway in the North direction. You can just look down at where you started directly below you. But every trail mile counts even when you make no headway towards Canada. Once you get to elevation you simply walk along the side of mountain generally gaining a little in elevation along the way until you finally reach a saddle and pass to the other side of the mountain. Then it is down to the floor and back up again. Repeat until you get tired. I got tired at a place called the 3rd gate (because there are gates on sections of the trail sometimes and this was the 3rd such gate on this section of the trail… clever). This also happens to be a spot where there is a huge water cache. Trail angels lug out water to remote places in the desert just for us hikers. Decided to stop here for the night. On the way I met an interesting guy named “Marathon John”. He is retired and approaching 60 in age but a very experienced and fast hiker. He also seems to require practically no water. When I met him we had 7 miles to go to 3rd gate and he had less than 1 liter of water remaining. I on the other had still had 3 liters of water. I asked if he needed more and he said 1 liter was plenty and lectured me on carrying too much water. Foolish to lug water to water he says. Now he did the 7 miles in 2 hours. I did the 7 miles in 3.5 hours. Along the way I met another happy hiker and his name was “Happy Feet”. He said his name did not reflect the state of his feet which were blistered but that he did a jig at some point in the trail and got his name. He seemed happy with the name. A young man who would rather hike than go to school. He did the Appalachian trail two years ago and then went to a year of school and is now doing the PCT. Happy Feet was young and full of energy. When I made it to 3rd gate and the water cache both Marathon John and Happy Feet were there and waiting indicating they were wondering how long it was going to take me go get there. We talked a bit and they continued hiking while I decided to spend the night there. I had what I thought was a good nights sleep but in the morning this guy comes over to me and asks me if I am OK. Sure….. why? Well, he says, because you snored like a bear till midnight and then I never heard you again and so I wondered if you were up all night!! So, I slept great, but apparently this poor guy did not sleep a wink first because I was snoring (like a bear of all things) and then I wasn’t snoring. Poor guy. Turns out his trail name is “Glide” which I found out later on in the trail when our paths crossed again (He did not camp next to me the next time).

Lenora’s Note:
We are easing into this adventure. 3 days hiking followed by 4 days off. It really helps me get ready for the weeks to come. I’m still heavily involved in the Church directory project and need to be home whenever possible so when Don starts again I rush back to Escondido to take care of home chores. I am still in school and working on keeping up with my reading so I can be prepared for the final. School was more fun when we were attending class together.

This is exactly the same hike I described in one of my training hikes. During training the weather was pretty bad but today the weather was about as perfect as you can want for hiking in the desert. It was in the lower 60’s and clear with a slight wind. I remembered how this section of the PCT kicked my ass during the training walk and I was hoping that today would be different. From my performance so far, I had no reason really to expect it would be any easier and in fact it was not. It is just a lot of uphill hiking and I am having a hard time catching my breath, so I stop quite often. I don’t stop for long periods of time but enough so that 2 miles per hour is about as fast as I get. Anyway, I have decided that I will stay in a motel in Mt. Laguna and call Lenora and ask her to see if she can get a reservation and wanted to come up and spend the night and then we would go home the next day. So rather than hiking on Thursday till the end the day, I will spend it at home with Lenora and then that night go to the spiritual retreat weekend. Lenora is able to make the reservations but gets a little attitude from the guy she was talking to. Something about you husband is a big boy now and should be able to make his own reservations. Pretty funny. Eventually he does allow the reservations to be made. There was not a lot of traffic on this portion of the trail today. I suspect everyone that started on the 6th and 7th has already passed me and of course those to started today have not caught up yet :). One person did pass me while I was stopping to catch my breath. He was doing the PCT piece meal and this year he was doing the two sections that he had remaining to complete the trail. His name was Daniel with a trail name of Toucan and perhaps he could see something in my eyes because he gave me a lot of encouragement about how the trail would become more scenic and that as time went on I would get more energy. Basically this is going to get easier so keep it up. There was also a runner who passed me running up the trail with weights in his hands and then before I got to Mt. Laguna this same runner passed me going back down. I was not amused. Just keep moving one foot in front of the other and eventually made it to the Pine trees that signal that Mt. Laguna is near and coming from the desert into the Pines there was an over whelming smell of Pine. Do not remember having that sensation last time I did this trail but it was welcoming and invigorating this time. I got to Mt. Laguna, exited the trail and made it to main road and not 60 seconds later, Lenora drove by. Amazing timing. We had a good night.

Lenora’s Note:
A hiking day for Don but a 0 day for me. Thankful for another day to rest. Air bags really pack a wallop. Chest hurts when I take a full breath and the bruises from air bags and seat belt are very colorful. I am so happy Don decides to stop in Mt. Laguna but I leave home anxious to make it up there in time to check in at the lodge before the store closes. Looking forward to the weekend. Don will be home all day before going to Whispering Winds for Cursillo and I will get to join him on Sunday. Busy day repairing things and fashioning a hiking pad for his backpack.

Friday is Adoration Day and I love the time with Jesus and spend much of it in praise for our blessings while asking for continued protection for Don. I also get to pray for the men on the Cursillo retreat. The time passes so quickly and I am reluctant to leave.

Saturday Don is hiking and I am at Women’s Ministry with my chest still hurting so I let them convince me to get checked out. I go to the urgent care center and the doc tells me there is no evidence of fracture but my ribs are bruised and it will take about 3 weeks to feel better. I am relieved and determined to take it all in stride.

Sunday is closura and Don is ready to be done so I meet him ‘on the mountain’ at the end of the Men’s Cursillo weekend.

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.

So I wanted to get started early on the trail and so Lenora and I got up about 3 and drove to the start of the trail. Actually, it wasn’t that easy, driving to the start of the trail that is. It is very easy to get with 2.2 miles of the start where the trail crosses Hwy 94 and that was a very tempting place to start. I noticed others did start at this point when I passed by here about 1.5 hours later. However, I wanted to start at the actual start and tried to get there. There are just places where you can go left or right on a dirt road and I always seem to make the wrong decisions as these points. After going down 1 such bad decision and turning around we met a Border Patrol car and he asked “Where are you TRYING to go?”. I actually laughed because his tone indicated he was tired of watching me be lost. So he pointed out where we should go and I headed that way and there must have been more than 1 way to get there because when we got to the right spot THERE HE WAS WAITING FOR US. I guess he was just making sure I did not make a wrong turn again. So here we on the road and the monument that marks the start (or the end I suppose if you choose to start in Canada) is just up the trail about 100 feet or so. So Lenora and I pray and I get out and get all my gear on and head up the trail to the monument. I take a picture of it and the reason why you don’t see that picture will become clear later. So NOW, standing at the monument, WHERE do I go. I really have only 3 options. The reason why I don’t have 4 is because in one direction is this huge fence that our country has built for unknown reasons really. I know that its only purpose right now that I can figure out is it tells me that I don’t want to go that way. BUT there are trails that lead in the other 3 directions and really no sign to indicate which of these trails in the right one. I could go down the same trail I came up from the car but I was SURE that was not the right way. Earlier we had seen where the trail had crossed the dirt road and I assumed that the trail was crossing from the east to the west. The monument was on the east side of the road and so I figured I wanted to there start on the trail going basically north or the trail going basically east thinking it would curve and cross the road. But I start going basically north and figure out (because my phone tells me I am not on the trail any longer) that was wrong. So then I go back and go east and again for the same reason figure out I was wrong. So then I simply walk back on the trail to the road and there on the other side of the road Lenora and I was on is a PCT sign. In my defense it was still dark. But finally I was walking on the trail and all was good and the trail crossed the road up a bit crossing from the west to the east. No way of knowing why I figured it was just the opposite when we past this point while driving.

I am not sure when other people started or where they started from but after about 3 hours of walking I am pretty sure that EVERYONE has passed me by. Almost everyone was in a big hurry and most did not even say HI as they passed. They were on a mission I suspect to get to the next point which for most was probably Lake Morena at the 20 mile mark. It made me think about my earlier life when the only thing important to me was getting from Point A to Point B and never pay attention or enjoy the journey between the points. There was only 1 other couple that was as slow as I was and we kept crossing paths along the way. They would rest and I would pass. I would rest and they would pass. We talked a bit but not much. I wish I would have gotten their story as I’ll bet it was interesting. After about the 5th time of crossing paths and I passed while they were resting, I never saw them again. And, I have never seen them sign in at any of the ledgers where you can sign in and make comments. Jennifer and Junior may not have had an REI Gary (previous post) like I had and may have had no idea what they were getting themselves into. I pray they are OK and even that they are still on the trail but just not the ledger signing types. You may be saying at this point, well if you passed them then why would they sign a ledger ahead of you? I say that because I am writing this after the fact and I ended up taking Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday off. In that amount of time I figure they would have passed my position.

So during the first 15 miles you ascend 1442 feet and descend 2042 feet and you end up at a place called Hauser Creek. This is a beautiful place to stop and camp if you are tired because what looms ahead at this point is a mountain to climb and an increase in elevation of about 1400 feet. I should have stopped because it was late BUT I had heard it was going to be a bit chilly and you don’t want to camp in the valley on a cold night. So I decided to start the climb. It was not a good decision but it worked out. Hiking up it did start to get colder and the wind started blowing and I was even going slower that normal. Finally I decided I was just not going to make it and I started to look for wide places in the trail where I could camp even if I blocked the trail a bit. I found such a spot and was ready to give it a try when a little voice said to look a little further. So I left my pack there and hiked a bit more up and around a corner and amazing there was a beautiful spot for camping and so I went back and got my pack and dragged it to the new location and set up tent. End of first day, about 17 miles. At the end, I was a disappointed that I did not get any further than I did AND I was disappointed that I cared. I really don’t care when or if I make it to Canada. The journey is the point. I prayed all day long. It was a great day.

Lenora’s Note:
We are so excited for the adventure to begin we are up by 3AM an on the road before 4. Not easy to find the memorial that marks the start or clear what to do once you reach that point but I know what I need to do. I pray for God’s blessing and protection for my adventurer and drive away as he begins to walk up the trail (I have no idea he is going the wrong way so I drive away happy that his adventure is underway). I head home to gather up my ‘gear’ for my day and then have a hour working out in the park with Dani, my favorite trainer. Quick rinse off and I rush down to Carol’s for our regular Monday Stitch-In. Tonight I’ve been invited to a small reception for Archbishop Cordeleone and I decide to head home to rest a bit since I will be out late.

It takes me over 4 hours to make the 25 minute drive home since about two miles from home I fall asleep at the wheel and crash my new car into a chain link fence at the Palm nursery. No one is hurt but the car needs to be towed OnStar works great and police an tow truck are dispatched to my location, quick to dispatch, slow to arrive. A wonderful young couple who saw me drive off the road stay with me until the police arrive and they are able to describe what they saw to the police. I am so grateful. My Guardian Angel must have been on high alert since I did not get hurt or hurt anyone else and there was someone who saw what happened and was willing to tell the story to the police. But I finally have to get a ride the rest of the way home so I call my trusty friend and faithful rescue angel Joan to come and take me home. I never make it to the reception.

Now I wonder, how do I tell Don without sending him into a panic???? Scarlet O’Hara provides the answer, “I will worry about that tomorrow.”