Okay, Rakcoughity, but where to begin?

With this by baker, “…and the potential injuries of one of your buddies resulting from wearing wingtip hiking shoes.” How did she know that Mark Schreiber forgot his boots and arrived in Acton, fully prepared, but wearing wingtips?

With the absence of Adam, but the presence of a new member, young not only in age, but spirit, and with little respect for the tried and tired ways of the founding fathers?

With the group’s change in plans Friday morning over breakfast, dumping the unpronounceable, Neosourdnahunk, for the all American, Crawford Pond, but then making camp the first night at, “The Grand Canyon of Maine,” Gulf Hagas?

With Mike and Mark Queijo jogging down barely passable, Chinese finger trap-like logging roads in the dead of night searching for that sandy campsite they were mostly certain existed?

With our late evening talk with “Deeds,” the AT hiker from Georgia, who had been in the woods for six months, and was a “mere” eighty-three miles from the end, the summit of Mt Katahdin?

With the long hike to the top of Little Boardman Mountain carrying two liters of wine (Yellowtail), bread, cheese, salmon mousse, and a heavy Zip Lock bag of Jan’s corn chowder but no pot in which to cook it? (sound familiar, Adam?)

Alrighty, this is my blog, and I’m going to write this story from my perspective of Chris’s perspective. I’ll start in the future and then slack-pack, flip flop, but not yo-yo (all AT language we learned from Deeds – short for Centipede) back to the beginning. Here goes:

Saturday night we gathered around our campfire, drinking and listening to the Red Sox on Chris’s transistor radio. Sure, we always bring bottles of good wine, a single malt or two, beer on occasion, but we never huddle fireside chat-like around a radio. I don’t care what is happening in the real world. And we didn’t turn in until 2 AM and didn’t crawl from our tents until 10:30 Sunday morning. Unheard of. Normally, I hear reveille shortly after sunrise and I spring from my tent to brew the morning’s coffee. Not this time, not this trip.

As I walked past Chris’s tent, the twenty-four year old rolled over and said, “Welcome to my world.”

To be continued…