We've gone public (again)!

We've just made the blog public again so that the seven people that read this no longer have to log-in. If we start seeing visits from Iowa or New Mexico again we'll lock it up again.

Cow Creek-Cook Hollow Trail

Classes start this week I decided we should go camping once before I get sucked into extended hours of thesis writing so we spent this past weekend on a short two-day backpacking excursion in northern Arkansas. Friday night we got completely confused trying to follow directions in a guidebook and drove down a road that was truly worthy of an off-road vehicle. Doris (the Taurus) rose to the challenge and championed the evil, boulder strewn two-track and charioted us back to the more hospitable maintained dirt road. So, after that half hour and since we couldn't see anything, we resigned to continue the search in the morning. We set-up in a small clearing which appeared to be the local "get drunk" camping area.

We set off after a late breakfast in search of the trailhead parking lot which happened to be a quarter mile back up the road (go figure). We tore down camp, packed our bags, drove to the parking lot, and set off up the trail. Atalie was our navigator for the trip and she made the decisions (based on the guidebook) which way to turn at the forks in the trail. She did a great job and got us around the loop with only a few short back tracks. We hiked for 7.5 miles on Saturday and then finished up the 10.5-mile loop on Sunday morning.

It got pretty cold the two nights we were there (Saturday it got to 20F and Sunday to 19F). Since our sleeping bags are only rated to 15F we got pretty chilly and ended up putting all of our clothes to bed: 2 sets of midweight long underwear, 1 set of heavyweight long underwear (fleece), down jackets, hats, and mittens. Then we threw in a couple hand warmers near daybreak. If we keep this kind of camping up, we're definitely going to need some warmer bags!

It was nice to be outdoors with just the two of us and we enjoyed ourselves despite the cold nights and some sore muscles today.

Trying not to burn breakfast...

The fearless leader hard at work...
Lost in the jungle

Cooking- backcountry style...

Back to the grind

We had a wonderful time during Christmas break and are sad to be away from our families. It was a whirlwind two weeks making time to visit with friends and family; yo-yoing between Okemos and Grand Rapids and making trips to Caro and Commerce on the other side of the state. Our trip back was uneventful until we got to St. Louis. We were going to visit the REI store which we don't have in Springfield, and see if I could find a decent pair of warm gloves. I called ahead for their hours and with our GPS in hand, we drove confidently into St. Louis content to the fact that we knew exactly where we were going.

This was until we happened upon a plethora of orange signage and an abrupt end to the interstate. We figured "hey, we'll just follow the detour, no problem." However, the detour was to the zoo and the space center, neither of which we wanted to go to so we chose the zoo thinking that was the most appropriate destination for us. The GPS during this time was having a corinary, recalculating our route at every intersection and trying to direct us back to the highway, which was a large muddy trench. So there we were: Atalie, the driver, with a "what the heck do you want me to do" look on her face and I, the navigator, just telling her to turn at the next intersection ("which way should I turn" "I don't know, try left"). After a long 10 minutes we stopped, reconfigured the GPS to ignore highways, then arrived at REI only 20 minutes behind schedule. Appropriately, I didn't find any gloves- Atalie did. I love St. Louis.

Work started back up on Monday (yay) and this morning Atalie and I started our first morning jog. We received some exercise clothing for Christmas (thanks!) and decided we should use it. Hopefully we'll be able to move enough tomorrow morning to get up and do it again. That is all from Springfield- have a good day.

[Atalie will hopefully be participating in this blog in the near future]