Thursday 3/22 – Mile 11-20 (total 10)

We hiked roughly 10 miles on the second day. We saw a few bugs that looked like a wingless, red, fuzzy bee. After a Google search, they are called red-haired velvet ants, which actually belong to the wasp family. We saw females because only males have wings. Hooray for sexual dimorphism and gender inequality. I hope the males are happy flying about while the females are scurrying around on dirt trying not to get squished by a hiker.

When we got to Lake Morena Campground we had our first trail magic from a guy named Possum, a Vietnam veteran originally from New Orleans but living in Birmingham the last 40 years. He had an RV set up and told us in his partly Cajun partly southern accent to help ourselves to the free water, snacks and outlets, and he can give a ride to the restaurant/convenient store. Elise still had 1 liter of water left, but we helped ourselves to some snacks and said hi to Bible who was exchanging bills for quarters to shower. We also got some quarters to shower and then set up our tent in the PCT hiker section up a hill behind some large boulders overlooking the flat plains and lake.

We made it to our first campground!

View of Lake Morena from our tent site.

Lake Morena tent site.

We took up Possum on his offer to give us a ride to the store/restaurant and were soon in heaven eating an Oreo milkshake, a hot pastrami sandwich and a cheeseburger.

Oreo shakes make me one happy camper.

A deluxe hot pastrami sammich and a plain ole cheeseburger.

Marcel said I out-What-a-Burgered him.

(Marcel said I Out-What-a-Burgered him.)

On the way back we saw an interesting Renaissance-esque property with lots of small buildings setup like its own little village, called Rancho de Zorros. A little further down the road, I had to stop to feed a horse grass. He was about as friendly as my mom’s dog, Little Man. Which is to say, he was an ass and tried to bite me every time he finished eating from my hand.

“Let’s feed the horsie grass!”, she foolishly said.

You sir, are an ass.

When we got back to camp Marcel helped Bible download the water reports to his phone using Google Docs, as any nice millennial would do for a friendly older hiker. I got to chatting with Possum and discovered he knew Dixie! (Dixie aka Jessica has a “famous” hiking blog and video blog called Homemade Wanderlust. She did the AT a few years ago, and hiked the PCT last year. We watched every PCT video she made, and studied every post-hike tip she mentioned. So meeting someone who knew her personally was like meeting Angelina Jolie’s next door neighbor.

It started to rain a little while we sat under the RV’s awning and discussed our plan for the next day, which consisted of taking a zero and waiting for Marcel’s chaffed…area…to heal. To our surprise, Possum went in the RV and came back out with a couple tablespoons of coconut oil in a ziplock bag. A little skeptical of it’s healing properties, we took the oil and thanked him. We ended up staying until dinner time and were just about to go to our tent to cook when this generous man went in the RV again and offered us macaroni vegetable soup. Sitting with this kind stranger with some country music playing in the background, we sipped hot chocolate and slurped up the soup. It was around 8ish (hiker midnight) when we thanked Possum for everything and slinked off to bed.

He somehow snags the most comfortable spot in the park.