July 4

Happy Birthday America!

As we are accustomed to doing, we stayed in the room right until the last minute before checking out in the morning.  No real plan of how far to go today.  The area north of town is still in the 'no camping' zone.  The first shelter we could get to is 14 miles away.  It was still ridiculously hot outside today too.  We hung out at the ATC for a while.  Met a really nice local who drove me to a Best Buy so I could get a new mp3 player.  Nobody wanted to hike out in the afternoon heat, so we decided to wait until about 5:00 or so before we started moving.  We figured in this long, flat section, we could do a little night hiking.  Plus, we had some fireworks that we wanted to light off for celebration of the 4th.  The hike out of town was really fun.  We had tunes playing from my speakers, and moseyed along through woods and past corn fields.  We took a lot of breaks to snack, hydrate, and just goof-off.  At dusk, we walked through one section of the woods, where apparently we had startled a huge flock of birds or bats.  We couldn't see what it was, but there was a huge mass of some kind of winged creatures, making all sorts of noise, flapping above our heads.  Kinda creepy.  At one point, just after dark, we came out onto a road, and sat down on a grassy knoll over looking a huge field.  We stopped for a long break there.  We could see fireworks off in the distance from three different cities.  "oohhh, to the left", "oh, did you see the big one on the right?", "middle, middle!".  Pretty cool.  Once the finales were over, we got up and kept on hiking.  We made it to a pedestrian bridge that crossed Rt 11, going in to Carlisle, Pa., around 10pm.  We could see the glow of a Days Inn sign from where we stood.  There was still about 6 miles to go to get to the shelter.  Yeah, that wasn't happening.  This was a pretty clear spot, so we waited for no traffic to be going by, and lit off some of our fireworks.  Then we headed to the hotel to split a room.  Showers three nights in a row, man, I'm getting spoiled.

Cornfields at sunset on the AT.