The tales of date night continue. September was my turn again, and the date night was scheduled for Friday, September 4. I took Mike camping.
Friday: We kicked things off by closing on a townhouse! Yay! Then we drove 2.5 hours to Shenandoah National Park…distance wise, it shouldn’t be that long but…traffic. Unfortunately, we got there after the park “closed” but we were still able to get in. I might feel bad because we didn’t pay, but we have a national park pass, so we didn’t miss out on paying. The campground itself was at capacity, and I didn’t reserve a spot anyway. We don’t have much luck reserving campsites. I planned on us backcountry camping. I applied for a permit online, got an e-mail back of my application…maybe that was our permit. Anywho…it was 2000 and too dark to try to hike to a spot to camp. We found a spot to pull over that had a flat, grassy spot next to the parking lot. Perfect for pitching a tent. We set up our tent and went to bed. Around 0230, we got neighbors. At first all I heard was some light music, and then they honked. I think it was an accident. I also had to go to the bathroom. Fortunately, the honk woke Mike up, so we went for a short walk into the wilderness and went to the bathroom. Yay for husbands. Worried we might not fall back asleep we chatted a bit….and then zzzzz
Saturday: Real wake up was around 0600. We packed up our tent, made some cold oatmeal, and drove back to Matthew’s Arm Campground and trailhead. On the way we stopped at some overlooks to see a gorgeous sunrise. We then hiked Tracer’s Trail to Overall Run to see Overall Run Falls. The falls were pretty, we hiked around trying to find the beginning of the falls but couldn’t find it. We decided to head back to the car and got lost. We took a wrong turn and wound up on Beecher Ridge Trail. We had seen a post that said Matthew’s Arm Campground 0.9mi and I was pretty sure we had gone further than that so Mike pulled up the Shenandoah National Park app, despite horrible service, and found our blue dot…we weren’t on the right trail. We backtracked and got back on the right trail. When we got back to the car I made us some PB&Js and Mike went to see if we would be able to get a campsite. They were full. Which was ok with me because I wanted to backcountry camp. We packed up our packs and started hiking towards the Appalachian trail. I can’t tell you how far we went because I didn’t track it but it was about 3.5 hours from the trail head. We made it to Gravel Springs and then hiked back about 15 minutes to set up camp.
We got our tent set up around 1700 and then started scavenging for twigs for fire. It was a little rough getting the fire started, but it turns out Tostitos are nicely flammable. Once the fire was started we warmed up some Amy’s soup – lentils and vegetables and made s’mores. Yum. We spent the evening just staring at the fire and listening to nature.
I had a really good night sleep, temperature was perfect, and I was exhausted. I think Mike slept well too…he said he did. Since our legs were fresh the hike back to the car was only 2.5 hours. Wearing new hiking boots for the first time wasn’t the brightest idea…20 miles later… Then our hiking/camping adventure was over. It was awesome.
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