My Journal

A long torturous hike!

My wonderful wife wanted to take a long hike today so I picked out Prince Willian Forresy Park as the location.  It sits outside Quanico Marine Corps Base and is only 30 miles away from our house.  Too bad it took us 1.5 hours to get there.  Damn traffic and accidents!  Anyway we stopped at he visitors cented and spoke to the staff there.  A very helpful volunteer plotted out 2 different routes we could take that would have us hiking more than 10 miles either way.  WOW!  We did not get started until 12:30 so we knew we had to hussle to beat the setting sun.  We were going up and down hills, walking along streams,  we even saw a small water feature along the way,  shame on them calling it a water fall!  water falls have water falling vertically, not babbling over rocks like that!  We hiked so long my phone battery ran out of charge so we don’t know the actual distance completed but based on the time we hiked we can take the average speed we traveled and see we did at least 12 miles in about 4.5 hours.  This hike brought about a lot of pain and discomfort in my ankles and knees.  I think the 5+ mile jog I did yesterday was a contributing factor.  I was so glad to finally make it back to the truck and take some Advil.  The last time we checked the phone trascking program we had hiked 9 miles and had been hiking 3 hours and 17 minutes.  We made it back to the truck in another 1 and 15 minutes.  Funny thing was I was really feeling the pain and needed to “job” really slowly just to have my muscles and joints working differently. It work and allowed us to cover more ground.  It was starting to get scary since the daylight was fading as we were working our way back to the truck.  I started thinking how crappy it would be if we did not navigate the trails properly and end up in the dark.  I did not have a flashlight with us.  Also I had worn my wind breaker the whole hike and did not have anything else to put on to keep me warm if the temperature dropped.  My wife did have the jacket she took off earlier if she needed to add some warmth.  Everything was fine and we made it back no problem.  We had plenty of water with us as well as some protein bars and apples for food.  Once we settled in at the truck we enjoyed the tune salad we had waiting for us in the cooler.  I knew we would be pushing the phone battery to its limit with the tracking program running  so we only took pictures once.  For some reason we both saw this one area on the trail and new we each needed a picture here.

Today we learned that my light pack is the right size for both of us.  It holds just enough to be useful for long hikes like today.  We also learned my wife’s new pack is smaller and not big enough for hikes like today.  That is too bad.  It is an OK pack but it looks like we will be getting another one to match the one I have.  When you find something that works you got to stick with it!