June 1

Scrabble tournament anyone?

We woke up this morning, eaten alive by mosquitoes.  I counted 27 bites on my right hand alone.  Poor Hashbrown's legs looked like some alien life-form from all the bites she had.  We had a weather report for today.  Rain, thunderstorms, hail, high winds.  The kicker:  basically the entire state of Virginia was under a tornado warning.  We all talked about it, trying to convince each other that it was a good idea not to hike today.  Apache had made a scrabble board on the bottom of his Tyvek ground cloth.  So we all decided to stay in the shelter and play Scrabble all day to wait out the nasty storm.  Nice, relaxing day.  The privy was super nice here too, so that was a bonus.  Haha.  We played a lot of Scrabble.  I did a crossword puzzle with Hashbrown.  Apache built a nice dam/spout in the creek next to the shelter to make water gathering easier for us.  Tink and Apache came into the shelter with us that night.  After dinner I was jamming out to some Daft Punk that Tink had on her Ipod.  Croc Hunter made a Bear Grylls style torch.  A ridge-runner from the Park Service came up to the shelter just before dark, talking to us for a while, just to check on the hikers in the area to make sure everyone was doing okay.  The storm had played peak-a-boo all day with us.  The wind would pick up, the sky would get dark, and it would pour for about 20 minutes.  Then it would clear up.  That process kept repeating all afternoon and night.  We definitely would have been okay hiking, but we did hear reports of the storm being much, much worse in other areas nearby, with quarter-sized hail and 50 mph winds.  We were happy with our decision.  It was my first zero day in the woods.  It was awesome.