camping

i forgot how much i love hiking.

i love just being in the woods (or the bogs in ireland) and just wandering through the mountains and rocks. and just being alive. being super sweaty and gross and loving the moment you get to where you are camping for the night and the feeling of taking off your 30 pound pack is the best thing ever.

the boy and i had a good time hiking this weekend. we planned to be gone for 2 nights, but we changed our plans after the first night and came home saturday afternoon. but it was still a lot of fun :)

we hiked 5.5 miles on friday afternoon, enjoying ourselves walking through the beautiful and quiet woods of northern nj. it was a good hike, despite it being gross outside, yay temperature in the 90s and super humid! we saw a bear, which isn't rare in the area. but it was his first time seeing one, so that was fun. we set up camp and made dinner and just relaxed, before heading to bed. though i've camped a ton of times, i usually don't have a sleeping pad, but it was pretty bad this time without one. so we decided at like 3am, when we were both up that we would just hike tomorrow and not do the second night. i would have been fine, but he was new to camping, so for next time we'll both get sleeping pads to make it better. so saturday we were up and out for our 10 miles to where we left his car. i got to show him two of my favorite places along the trail in nj - sunrise mountain and the culver fire tower. which both had gorgeous views. we hiked the 10 miles pretty quickly and we back at the car around 1.30. we then had to go back to get my car and then headed back to my house.

so while we weren't out as long as we planned, we still had fun, and now we know what to do for next time.

other than that i had a pretty quiet weekend. sunday went up to see some of my mom's family for the afternoon and enjoyed that, as i haven't seen them in a while. i'm looking forward to this week. one of my good friends from ireland is in the states for the summer, so we are going into nyc tomorrow and hopefully see a show and then wednesday we are going hiking in the gap. we are going to do my favorite mt. tammany and then sunfish pond, to make for a nice day hike. so i'm super excited to see her!

and todays plans include the library! yay books, continuing to clean the disaster that is my room and starting to lesson plan. whoooo!

yay for the appalachian trail!

view from culver's fire tower... my fav spot on the at in jersey

sunrise mountain, another favorite in nj.

the boy and i