"We should have a Twilight marathon after this trip....Wait, no--that sounds awful!"

Tuseday morning, 3:30 AM and I need to relieve myself. This always poses a dilemma when living on the trail. These things need to be done a few hundred feet away from water sources, and preferably a few hundred feet from camp. Consequently, middle of the night trips require putting on clothes, boots, and wandering sleepily through the brush to find a suitable location. Today, it's complicated even more by the fact that it's raining. If I go, I have to prevent water from getting into the tent and stay dry so I don't shiver the rest of the morning. I decide to wait.

Fortunately, the rain has stopped by the time we get up at 6:00. Decisions are much easier to make when you're getting up anyway.

We come upon our first major vistas today. Looking down over the gorge is an incredible experience. The only evidence of humans is a bike trail at the bottom of the canyon, a farm across the canyon, and a cell phone tower. No roads. No highways. No cars. And nothing between us and the bottom but an 800 foot drop.

At one of these vistas, we managed to get cell phone reception. It would be the first of two times we could get messages out to the rest of the world. Steve took the opportunity to send a text to his wife: "Happy 30th Anniversary." Thanks, Denise, for letting us borrow Steve.

Our plan today was to walk about 5 miles. At the last vista before our scheduled campsite, Danny looked at the map and decided that we were making good enough time to justify going two more miles. They boys agreed to it, and we pressed on. It was an ingenious decision, too. The scheduled campsite was short on water, heavy on mosquitoes, and light on tenting space. The campsite Danny took us to was heavy with water, had plenty of tent space, but still had a lot of mosquitoes.

We left the boys to fend for themselves. The adults took a few minutes to bath out of the stream and do some laundry. The water was cold, refreshing, and it was nice to get some clean smelling clothes. We then worked on pumping water and starting a fire to smoke out the bugs.

There was more Twilight discussion at some point in the day. The themes that get established early in the week tend to recur often throughout the week. I suggested that we should do a Twilight marathon on Saturday night after we got home. The idea was met with instant praise--for about three seconds. Then it occurred to us that we really had no interest in such a thing. We all very suddenly had other plans.