Hey All –

I thought I should do a brief re-cap of our camping weekend!  We left Boston around 2:30 on Friday afternoon.  Before we got in the car, we paid a quick visit to Starbucks and I got a Frappuccino Light for the car ride.  I used to never get Frappuccinos at Starbucks because they were soooo full of calories… but now with the Light option, a tall size is between 90 – 130 calories, depending on what flavor you order.  On the rare occasion that I do have one of these drinks, they usually count as my afternoon “snack”.

The traffic getting out of town on Friday wasn’t pretty, but it was not as bad as I thought it would be. We made it to the White Mountains and our campground by 6 o’clock and that was a lot earlier than I thought we would be getting in!

Here is a picture of Ben starting to set up our tent:

On Friday night we had real camper’s food for dinner… I had a hot dog and a half a serving of noodles. . . I felt like I was roughing it!
Here I am on Friday night enjoying a beer by the campfire. I don’t actually drink beer that much – but when I am camping, I will definitely have a beer after a long day!

It was cold both nights and I had a mid – weight fleece jacket that I wore on both nights.  On Saturday night I was also wearing a wool hat. 🙂

On Saturday morning I was planning on having instant oatmeal because it’s super easy to boil water over a camp fire… but Ben surprised me with a real breakfast of eggs, bacon and toast. I had two eggs, two pieces of crispy bacon and a piece of toast.  About an hour after breakfast (oh – did I mention the instant coffee we had at the campsite!? Yum!) Ben and I started off on a great hike. We left our campsite and started off to Lonesome Lake…

I think it took us about an hour to get to the Lonesome Lake hut which was about two miles from our campsite – with an elevation gain of about 3,000 feet. The area was beautiful!



Here I am walking across one of the many wooden walkways on the trail…

I had my Camelbak, treking poles, and compass with me… and a map in my pack… I think I was pretty well prepared. I needed the long sleeve shirt because while I was hiking up hill I was hot (and in a Northface tank top) but once the trail leveled out, it was cool once again.

One of my favorite part of the hike was the fact that we were hiking on the Appalachian Trail!!!!! Wooo – hooo! Most of the trail is marked by white blazes and here is the first one I saw:

Blue Blazes are a little different, they are near the AT but aren’t officially part of the trail… a lot of hikers that follow the blue blazes are called “Blue Blazers” and some AT hikers think that Blue Blazers are not actually hiking the AT… it can be very controversail in the AT hiking world 🙂

Ben and I were Blue Blazing it for a while…

When we got up to the Lonesome Lake hut, Ben and I took a break and both had a Clif Bar. I had the banana bread flavor, and it was quite good especially after a lot of hiking.

Well, I think that about wraps it up. We had SO much fun this weekend, and I cannot wait to get back to the White Mountains soon for another hiking trip!