Hiking

We went hiking on Saturday, but it took me until today to get the pictures because our internet at the apartment hasn’t worked for a few days. We mooch off of our neighbor’s wireless connection, so sometimes it doesn’t work and there’s really nothing we can do about it. Anyways, back to hiking. We went with a group of people from church up to the Shenandoah mountains. They’re small mountains compared to the Cascades, but they still made for a very challenging hike. We hiked up one specific mountain called Old Rag – but I have no idea why it’s named Old Rag. I wonder who decided to name a mountain Old Rag?? Why not something majestic or tough sounding?? Oh well, it’s called Old Rag and, like our fickle wireless connection, there’s nothing I can do about it. We left at 6:30 and had to drive for an hour and a half to get there. It was a beautiful drive, but I don’t have any pictures of the Virginia countryside because somebody – I won’t say who, but I bet you can guess – forgot to charge the camera even though I specifically asked him the night before if it was charged and he assured me it was. So we had to save our pictures for the hike and the view from the top.


We hiked 3.5 miles up the mountain and it was hard!! The first part wasn’t bad because it was just switchbacks up the base of the mountain, but it kept getting steeper and steeper the farther we went. At the end of this, I thought we had reached the top, but we hadn’t. We then had to do something called a “rock scramble,” which apparently is jumping from rock to rock at the top of a steep mountain. They were more like boulders actually and at times we had to practically scale the boulders and crawl through narrow cracks in between them. This took forever but when finally reached the summit… there was a bagpiper up there!!! He was standing of the tallest boulder and piping away. Renee, I thought of you when I saw this - though I don’t know why. We ate our lunches at the top and then began hiking 4.5 miles down, which was obviously much easier than going up the mountain.

On the way home, we stopped at an amazing milkshake stand. We had seen it on the way to the mountain and Brandon couldn’t get it out of his head, so we heard about his craving for a chocolate milkshake repeatedly over the next 8 hours until he finally got one. He also tried to order two chocolate milkshakes, but I wouldn’t allow it, so he drank half of mine. Ooohh, and some other highlights: we saw a man flying a kite at the top of the mountain which he lost control of and crashed into a family enjoying their lunch and on the way up we passed about 15 Amish schoolgirls who were hiking in their homemade dresses. Unfortunately, I don’t have pictures of either of those unforgettable events, but here are the few pictures I do have.

This is the view from the summit

... and the bagpiper of course!!

And here's one random picture of my haircut so that you all can finally see it.

I had alot more pictures from hiking, but Brandon's computer won't let me post sideways pictures for some reason. Whoever said Macs are better than PC's, well I think they're crazy. I don't see what's so great about Macs.