Graybeard Mountain, North Carolina

All right everybody...

I don't know why we are doing this to ourselves: giving you yet another opportunity to point your fingers and laugh, but we know you love us for it, so here goes...

We stumbled upon this gorgeous little town in North Carolina, about 1/2 hour outside of Asheville, called Montreat. They had some good hiking there and we were itching to go camping. It all started out innocently enough with an old fashioned diner breakfast (eggs, toast, hash browns and sausage for only $2.50!), and then...It was a beautiful sunshining day at noon, so, disregarding the time of year, the altitude, the weather at night and probably every other thing we should have thought of, we created this rather true story for your enjoyment. I, Keturah, claim no responsibility for it as it is 3:30 a.m. and I am at Denny's, getting refills of hot chocolate in order to avoid sleeping in the car...

At this point in the post, we had a great video we recorded telling the whole story right after it happened, late in the night when we were likely delirious. You would have had a good laugh, only we cannot get the video to load....And that is why this post is so long coming...we spent a couple hours trying to make it work. Our apologies.

Ok, so what happened:

All was well until we took the road off the trail that three people told us NOT to take. There is no explanation for this except that it is us. Still, after an hour of backtracking, the sun was shining, the mist was enchanting and we were optomistic. We made it to camp around four, excited for our first night of camping! It was going to be dark soon, so we gathered wood. No problems here except that there wasn't dry wood anywhere because a cloud rests on the mountain day and night! But would two adventurers like ourselves let that deter us??? Nooooo. So, until dark (about an hour), we built a dead fire, quickly charred some marshmallows and called it good. So much for the planned bra burning.... ;). Keturah did boil water in the coals though! A succcess! Anyway, being the old people that we are, we went in the shelter, bundled up in our sleeping bags, drank a little wine, smoked a little cigar, ate a little bread, granola, biscotti, etc. I, Keturah would like to give a shout-out to Kendra's unfailing positive attitude because I probably would have been lost to discouragement long before this. Due to our vigorous day of hiking and the darkness, we settled in to sleep. BUT YOU TRY TO SLEEP TO THE SOUND OF SCURRYING MICE AND THE THREAT OF BEARS OUTSIDE YOUR DOOR DURING A HARRY POTTER KIND OF NIGHT ON A HORROR FILM KIND OF MOUNTAIN! The good news is that the bears never got us. The mouse who ate through my sleeping bag cover never got us. Nothing got us on our whole hike back down the mountain in the misty damp darkness.

Ha ha ha...yes, I know...it is very funny. Let me just say that it wasn't just one tiny little innocent mouse. Maybe that is the only one we saw, but I know that it was running back to its mouse hole to summon the red-eyed mouse army to come bite our toes off (and you know it too...)!

Anyway, we found peace in the mountains earlier that morning...that is really all there is to say about that...