Dan & Van: October 2006

Monday, October 30, 2006

Dan's Boat

Here's a picture of the much acclaimed boat! She's a beauty!

We wanted to see some fall leaves, so we took a trip last week to Smoky Mountain National Park. We took our time getting up there and saw some beautiful fall color on the way! The pictures can't capture the brilliancy of the colors. We decided that's the reason you have to go on trips...if you could experience it all through pictures, why leave home?

We noticed as we were driving north that people were more and more bundled up! That's when we began to get scared!The plan was to take a loop backpacking trip and spend two nights out on the trail. As usual, our hike began as the sun was going down!

The first night we stayed in a shelter on the Appalachian Trail. It had stone walls on three sides and a tarp covering the fourth. As you can see there was also a fireplace...thankfully our bunkmates already had a healthy fire going when we got there. There were about 6-7 other people staying in the shelter that night. Many of them had hiked over 1000 miles on the AT this year. This was the first time we'd met "thru-hikers" on one of our trips.
It got cold overnight. When we woke up in the morning our water bottles were frozen. One of the guys had a thermometer on his pack and it was 20 degrees inside the shelter! Dan and I were discussing what to do when it started snowing outside!

Can you believe this?

Dan said we were there to have fun, not to earn our Cold Weather Camping boyscout badges. I told him we'd already earned our badges the night before! The next night we'd be staying in our tent. It was supposed to remain cold for one more day, then it was supposed to start raining...can you say hypothermia? We felt like we'd done most of what we came to do -- we'd seen beautiful leaves on the way there -- so we hiked out and came back to the warm Florida sun!
There were more great views on our way out of the park!

Thursday, October 12, 2006

Life at the beach...

Here are some pictures of our townhouse in Atlantic Beach! We have been adding to it a little each week with bargains from garage sales and end of summer clearance. The downstairs is mostly furnished, still want to add some pieces upstairs and hang up pictures, etc.