Our packs threw up, and The Gully Washer

It wasn’t as hard as I expected, getting up at 2:15 am. We dashed here and there, stuffing my duffle bag and Anji’s pack and gear, wrapped in black plastic bags and adorned with address labels, into the car. And we guzzled coffee, and we were off. Into the night. Into the terminal, and then into the dark tube of the aircraft.

Relegated to the back of the plane due to poor check-in planning on our part, I dozed, and Anji wrote in her blog, and pretty soon we landed and Denise was there. Lovely Denise. And she whisked us away to Starbucks where our packs threw up all over the lawn and then we put them back together again in a much more orderly fashion. And everything fit. And we were so pleased. And then the grocery store for cheese and water and then all of a sudden we were at the trail head and Denise was gone and we were kind of staring around.

And then the walking started. And so did the flowers. Bam! Yelling at you in yellow and purple. Yelling at you some more in red and white. Looking at you all fireworks and explosions and dainty spinny wheels and bells and trillium trios. Flowers, flowers everywhere. It was spring in summer.

Anji carefully took pictures of every single new kind of flower and stopped to admire a million more. I stared at the clouds, billowing billowing on the horizon. Thunder in the far distance.

And pretty soon we were eating peanut butter and salami and cheese and water, not all mixed together, mind you, and then that same thunder threated an eminent gully washer. We headed 0.8 miles more down the trail to a campsite and set up just in time. The rain lasted ten minutes before the hail started while lightning split the sky in half a million times over just above our heads.

Then it poured rain for a hundred years until bedtime.