Catalina II

To be very honest, I struggled for the first day of backpacking with my "vacation."  It was beautiful, wonderful, and such a lovely scenic view but it was all a lot of WORK to make it happen!!!  Once I changed my mindset, I was able to enjoy myself a lot!! 

I don't like being cold and our first evening was by far the most chilly!!!  We had a wild animal get into one of the tent cabins and eat trail mix through Lorinda's pack and plastic ziploc bag as we were away for lunch after arriving to Catalina.  That set everyone a little on edge since it was our first day there and we didn't want to have a shortage of food.  That evening after our small hike into town and our dinner, when we came back I saw the house cat escaping the same tent cabin again, this time breaking into someone else's food!!  That evening that cat came back but Connie was outside on her phone and she saw eyes and shewed it away!!!

That night we were all cold.  For starters, we should have used our sleeping pads on our cots....  Anyway, I woke up with numb toes and a very restless night, but once we left camp with our backpacks on, I was becoming more excited for the adventure! 

A fun joke was the talk of our trip after some "undies" appeared on our chair of our tent cabin (that would be Connie, Gretchen, Heather, and I)  It was the funniest thing as whispers were going around and no one wanted to offend anyone but Connie and our group were sure they weren't OURS, yet they were on our chair!!!  Finally, something was said to look at them closer and sure enough, they had names wrote on each pair, Heather's name on the thongs, and Gretchen's on the other pair!!!!

The joke of our first morning!!

Leaving 2 Harbors for our first long day of backpacking!

Cute little town

A friendly man took our picture!  He thought we were crazy at how far we were planning to hike that day!

By lunch break every one was already feeling a bit sore and
 that was the easiest part of that day hike!

Heather

Up, up we go on the trans Catalina trail!

looking back

looking forward

It was so beautiful and perfect weather!!!  We couldn't have chosen better weather!!

That day we put in at least 14 miles of hiking!!  It was very long and many of our group had fat blisters to show for it by the end of the day!!  We stopped at the airport for an early dinner and then hiked another couple of miles to our campground, where we barely made it before the sun set!  We all set up our tents and crawled into our sleeping bags, well, except for Connie and Gretchen who started a fire and sang campfire songs!  Just kidding, they didn't sing, but they talked around the fire.  I didn't want to get cold and was pretty cozy after getting into my sleeping bag, so I chose to stay there and then, of course, my eyes fell closed shortly after!