#bugs like tapioca

Sky Plantation House With Ponies, Level 8

I don’t have so many pictures from today.  We’ll have to rely on P2.  I actually liked this park way better than Shenandoah River, which was odd b/c I expected the opposite.

Trails: SUPER AWESOME!  So much up-and-down.  This is from the pony-themed side of the park and is therefore a bit crap.  The human-themed side of the park is way better.  We went up and up and up and then all around the houses and downish and then over some more and it was great.  We were even on the Appalachian trail for a hot second, which was Very Exciting and led to some deeply misleading but really fun to say out loud sentences for a while there.  There were nice benches where we could take appropriately-timed rest breaks.  It was awesome.  

Code Not Sure but Maybe Pink: There was a section of under a mile that was Bug Bonanza.  Seriously, we had to swat with our arms and breathe carefully to progress.  It was a wee windless zone and the bugs were like tapioca pearls in pudding, they were so thick.  That’s a gross image.  Believe in its emotional truth in your heart.

What Was In My Nalgene: I started off with mostly watermelon Gatorade, then kept drinking half and refilling with water.  In general, I really like watery Gatorade when hiking.  There’s a certain point, though, where this becomes something you definitely do not want: a thin pinkish bitterish fluid that makes a person think about nothing quite so much as blood plasma, except that I bet plasma is a bit less gross, what with no artificial flavoring.  Wasn’t as bad as when I did it the previous day with Diet Coke, though.

Siesta: One part idyllic, one part frustrating.  The one big bummer of this park is the total lack of viable siesta sites.  There were a couple of picnic tables chucked about the park at random intervals, almost as if they were in awkward storage awaiting some final placement.  There wasn’t really a good spot to siesta, particularly if you want trees for hammock time.  So we wound up in this brushy spot behind a place to park that had two trees relatively close (no one wants to feel isolated during siesta!).

At that point, friends, it was pure bliss.  We had a good long hike that day for people recovering from mystery crud and not in hiking shape--7-ish miles?  And we decided to siesta only at the end, since we’d stoked the boilers well beforehand with eggs and biscuits.  Tuckered out and hungry, I laid in my double-sweet hammock and ate these:

(Photo provided by theimpusivebuy and used under a CC license.  As if there’s a world where I have the presence of mind to take a photo of these while in hammock time.)

Holy bananas, do I love Combos.  They are possibly my favorite crap snack food.  Until I bought these at a Sheetz on the drive up, I did not know (!) they came in 7-layer-dip flavor.  People of the Internet, these have replaced Pizzeria Pretzel as the Most Desirable Combos option.  They are incredible and I long for more of them deep in my soul.  Looking at this picture makes me mourn the lack of convenience stores between my apartment and my office or I swear to you I’d stop in and buy some at 8:30 in the morning tomorrow.  I ate at least 2/3 of the bag in one go, then ate a giant apple under the Mitch Hedberg Theory of Nutrition, and then read Star Trek books on my phone for an hour.