.November 4-5, 2006
This is it. My final AT adventure for the year. A two week trek covering over 200 miles in Virginia. A few people have asked me, "Why are you going now?" Well, the hiking season is over in Maine unless you want to do winter hiking, so I thought I would head south. The drive is getting longer as I head further south so we decided to make a couple stops along the way.
First we stopped to visit my mom (Barbara Rathbun) and Sharon Lee, who has been a friend of the family since I was about 5. My mom made us delicious grill cheese sandwiches. I would have taken a picture of everyone but our camera was buried in the car somewhere.
We have a lot of friends in the Baltimore area and would have love to have seen them all, but we only had time for one more visit. We stopped in Catonsville on the southwest side of Baltimore to visit Laura Poulsen who we hadn't seen in about 6 years. When I switched my career 9 years ago from carpentry to computers, she took me and 3 or 4 other rookie programmers under her wing. She has been a great friend ever since. She has a fenced in backyard so we talked outside so Madison could run. Boy, did she have fun running in Laura's backyard. Laura is probably even a bigger dog lover than I am. She has 2 yorkshire terriers (Gabby and Tasha) and a maltese (Molly) with another yorkie on the way. Here is a picture that Lynn took using Laura's camera since ours was still buried. Molly was being camera shy.
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After leaving we had a few more hours to drive before reaching Buena Vista, Virginia. I was on the lookout for a sign in this town that I had read about in Runtrails' journal. I never saw it, but one day after dropping me off, Lynn saw it.
"Welcome to Buena Vista! 6002 Happy Citizens and 3 Old Grouches!"
Tomorrow I start hiking.
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