May 5th
Tomtit and I both slept fitfully last night — I think our tent is becoming the standard for sleeping and other beds are now weird. We hit up the complementary breakfast at around seven for mini waffles, bagels and cream cheese, eggs, strawberry-banana yogurt, orange juice and coffee. Then we headed back to the room to pack everything up and fill our water bottles from the sink.
We checked out of the hotel and headed over to Subway to grab some sandwiches to pack out for lunch (yum!). Once we were all ready to go we needed to get back to the trail, so commence the sketchiest thing we have done so far — we walked along a highway overpass with no sidewalk to get back to the McDonald’s where we started. I was sure a distracted truck driver was going to smash into us. We made it over alright though : )
The trail started by going under the highway we had just walked over.
We wound around past several train tracks and then started climbing away from the highway. There were some fantastic rocks.
We were walking along and I realized I had to pee. I have a p-style which is this plastic thing that lets me pee standing up, and I was just bragging to mama about how good I’ve gotten with it. Well, today I accidentally peed my pants. A little bit got away from the p-style and I had a wet spot on my shorts…serves me right for bragging! I told Tomtit it was the saddest day on trail for me (haha). Luckily it dried pretty quickly with the wind : )
We found a nice spot after about eight miles to eat our sandwiches with a view.
There was a small tarantula hanging out on the trail as well, which is unusual because I’ve only seen them at dusk. We were thinking he might have been stung by one of the many tarantula hawks we saw today.
After our lunch break the trail kept on climbing and climbing. The trail goes from 3000 ft to around 8000 feet in this section so we needed to get higher. There was a half mile stretch that was infested with poodle dog bush but an alternate road walk took us around the nasty plant (still no pictures of it, sorry!).
There was a tucked away flat spot after we had gone 17 miles from the McDonald’s and we grabbed it to make for an early day. Tomtit had a headache brewing and we didn’t want to push on. We are taking advantage of the time to eat snacks and blog!
Tomorrow we are going to check out Guffy campground for a water source, but if it is inadequate we will have to hitch into Wrightwood.
Jill and RT PCT 