Wan and I woke up on top of a mountain today.

I'm in Kentucky right now.

I'm not sure which is more of a shocker statement, so I guess I should just start over from the beginning. Today's been quite a day for transportation. Wan and I left yesterday morning for Worthington State Forest at the end of New Jersey's share of I-80. Along the way, she pointed out the exact spots where Keyur and Mihir had been ticketed at 83 and 84 mph, respectively, on their merry ways to Cornell; at one point, I hit the ill-fated 85 but slowed down as soon as I realized what a sad and funny successor to theirs my being ticketed would have made. We'd intended to hike a few miles of the Appalachain Trail to Catfish Fire Tower, a summer ranger lookout point for forest fires that stretched 100 feet high right on the edge of the AT. There were two approaches: a two-mile amble up a dirt road from the north, or a 9-mile walk from the very same Sunfish Pond mentioned in Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods and visited by Farz, Jay, Joyce, Wan, and myself almost two years ago. As we hurtled Pennsylvaniaward, a decision had to be made about which to take; it being well before noon, we opted for the latter.

We parked the car—oh, wait, there was a whole parent and car fiasco during which both her dad and my mom portended that we'd be raped; afterward, there was the next obstacle of the red Camry being too unreliable for the 100-mile drive but the new green Camry being too shiny and new (my dad had driven the medium and ideal green Camry to work—yes, my parents are entirely too creative with their car purchasing), thereby contributing to aforementioned rape. In the end, we took the 2002 on the condition that we take my mom's cell phone and call when we got there, before we went to bed, and when we woke up. I guess I chose a bad time to express my sentiment that cellular phones are a menace to society.

This cell phone theory was probably formalized during my trip to the INS office in Newark two days ago, one of the most extravagant wastes of time in recent history. I'd received a notice to be there for fingerprinting, the next stage of my naturalization application, on April 3, but was trying to get it over with before I had to go to school. No go. Not only had the manager left without really informing any of her subordinates where she was going or when she'd be back, or even delegating responsibility to her second-in-command, but noone could suggest any alternative plans. In addition, it was just a really depressing atmosphere: a couple hundred adults who'd left positions of honor in their native Asian or Latin American countries to begin all over from minimum wage in this country standing in scraggly order, snaking their way through the cinder block room, representing all the disparities between what America promises and what America implements.

Right. Back to cell phones. I think I avoid getting one because of the way it would let me be tracked 24/7, and as comfortable as I feel around other people, including even most strangers, I do need my little pockets of absolutely solo time. Sure, they can make their carriers feel more productive whilst in transit from one workplace to another, but I still think phone-based task accomplishment is of dubious quantity and quality. Or maybe I just like to wallow in my irresponsibility; I dunno. I'm just not particularly fond of them.

I'm impressed with myself: that was a triple digression. Oops. Getting back to our trip. We parked the car, said hi to the ranger, obtained an additional vague but focusedly AT map from her, and headed down the trail toward Sunfish Pond. I suppose that's ambiguous terminology for persons of normal logic, becaue "down" a trail always means forward regardless of elevation vector, and we were certainly headed uphill. I left the topo maps at home and currently have no internet connection, so I can't check my numbers, but I think it was 1,100 feet of elevation gain in a mile and a half.

Upon reaching the pond, though, we had basically climbed as much as we would the entire trip. It was smooth sailing at a pace which even left enough breath for conversation, although we didn't take advantage of it. Monday's lunch at Macaroni Grill, that night's jaunt to Edison Glen, Tuesday's pecan-pie baking / purported gear drop-offing, and our two-hour drive up to Worthington had given us lots and lots of time to catch up. We seemed all talked out, if such a thing was possible. Fortunately, we soon realized that it wasn't; anyway, the scenery offered plenty of fodder for commentary.

Let's take a geographical digression: the Delaware River runs north-south to demarkate the New Jersey/Pennsylvania border. Old Mine Road runs along the New Jersey side of the river, varying from 50 to 100 inland. In New Jersey, the divide of the Appalachains and, hence, the Appalachain Trail, essentially parallels the road and the river about a mile further inland.

To get to Sunfish Pond, then we'd simply walked perpendicular to all three. Now, in the more exposed parts of the trail, we could see Pennsylvania on our left and New Jersey on our right. One side was tangibly greener, while the other had bleak wintering trees and rectangular pools of brownish water that we joked were sewage treatment plants. Guess which one was which. Yep, you got it. Although I still maintain that Philadelphia ought to be the mid-Atlantic scapegoat. I mean, it doesn't even have street signs, an observation made by Dave Ng and me as we attempted to find Meenal and Becky at Penn last weekend. But I digress.

Wan and I both felt up to hiking the full distance to the fire tower that day, but other factors made us pause and reassess when we hit Mohican Road, which cut across the trail and leads to a hostel-type shelter open to through hikers in the summer. I'm not sure when it opened, but it must have been at least a decade ago, yet there was no mention of it on the 1994 topo maps I'd photocopied from the Earth Sciences library at school. After checking the map we'd gotten from the ranger, though, we spied a chart of point-to-point distances which told us that we were 2 miles away. This was after three hours of hiking, and we had to make sure that the next day we'd have time to hike out and drive back to Edison in time for me to do my hiking laundry and catch my 5:45pm flight. Yes, as both Wan and my mother say, I always cut it really close. But it seemed perfectly feasible, and increasingly so as we realized we could just walk back along the road the next day, and without our packs. So we kept going, expecting to get there in less than 40 minutes, and kept going, and going, and going, and going. Well, it wasn't that bad, but we decided that it could not have been only two miles away; a quick comparison between the topo map and the contours we were following seemed to indicate so as well.

In any case, we got there about a full hour after Mohican Road, and decided to try to ascend the ten or so flights of stairs to the fire tower and sleep in it that night if possible. As we ascended, the view got better and better, though the turnaround platforms got increasingly smaller and the wind fiercer. As we were about to take the last flight, we noticed that the stairs led to nowhere. Rather than ending at a door level with the floor of the tower or anything practical like that, it seemed to drop straight down into nothingness. And there was no visible indication of a trap door or anything of the sort. I'm guessing they must install something each summer, but that seems awfully inefficient.

Flummoxed, we headed back down and pitched our tent nearby. For dinner, we cooked some really colorful organic pasta I'd found at Whole Foods in Palo Alto and, yes, lugged all the way home. The bin is labelled "Neptune's Dream," and it's a mixture of cool seashell-ish shapes in red, green, orange, and yellow. I'd packed a little more than necessary, so Wan decided what we'd cook by individually choosing each piece of pasta to drop into the water.

No comment.

It was pretty cold by the time we finished, so I heated up some water for hot chocolate, though Wan adamantly refused to drink any because it would have meant having to go to the bathroom and all of its associated hassles. I made plenty of fun of her for that in addition to the pasta antics. Actually, I think I've figured out why she gets made fun of so much. Karla's the usual target, but I don't think she's been around as much on our epic trips, so Wan was involuntarily drafted as her substitute all throughout Acadia and into the school year, most especially by the Cornellians. We all have equally strange and make-fun-of-able thought processes—well, at least I do—but she just frankly externalizes all of them while the rest of us censor. See, honesty does get you in trouble!

After haranguing each other for nonexistent gossip, we fell asleep by 9ish and woke up at 6:30 the following morning, had weird leftover oatmeal from Assateague, and headed down the dirt path toward Old Mine Road. It was a pretty sweet downhill past some springs and rhododendrons, and we were at the bottom a lot faster we thought 2.2 miles would take us. There, we stashed our packs behind some trees and turned left/south on the road to get back to the car. The road was a steep downhill as well; in some parts, so much so that I would've sprinted down except for the heavy hiking boots.

After about half an hour of rather shin-jarring downhill, we hit Millbrook, a town that seemed to be in the wrong direction according to the ranger-issued map. It would have truly sucked to have to ascend the uphill again, so we refused to believe that we had made a wrong turn. Also, the route was so darn simple—down to the river and then left onto the road— that there was no way we could have messed up. After seeing some signs, we determined that it was indeed the right direction, and Wan decried the map as "the map from hell." Hee.

And so we went onward. In a situation reminiscent of cross-country LSD's, we unconsciously made each other walk faster even in the flat or uphill sections until we were taking 13 minutes from mile marker to mile marker along the road, a pace we kept up almost all 9 or so miles back to the car at 10:30. We drove back along the road, taking 23 minutes at 40ish mph to cover the distance that it'd taken us half the morning to walk, picked up our packs, and got back to 80E to head home.

Ooh! Before dropping Wan off, we vandalized Mr. P's car. He'd parked it across the street while Kedar took the jolly green bus to this year's Habitat trip to West Virginia, and I had some leftover car glass markers from graduation. We were originally gunning for a full-out mural, but Wan considerately pointed out that he might be really tired when they got back and have to go to school the next day. So we just drew a big smiley face on the front windshield and left it at that.

Unpack. Shower. Laundry. Repack, because I had a 5:45 flight to Cincinnati were I'd catch a connecting flight to New Orleans. Got to Newark, checked in, said bye to my parents, and all of that good stuff. Except the flight got delayed to 6:30 because of a plane switch, and then to 6:50, at which point it would be scheduled to land in Cincinnati at the exact same time—8:50 Eastern—that my next flight was supposed to take off. Hm. Having no dorm phone numbers written down on me, I called Wan, who fortunately found Roger online and acted as text-to-speech translator until we agreed that he'd go to the airport unless I called him that I didn't make the flight.

The plane was full of really jittery people, all on the verge of missing connecting flights. Gotta love that. They were all nice, though, which was good, considering that by the time we landed and taxied to the gate around 9:10, about half of us had indeed missed our flights to places ranging from Portland to Alberquerque. What made it even better that those were the last flights along those routes that day, and we'd have to wait til the next morning to get to our destinations.

Well, okay. I'd sorta been expecting that one. But since I'd been placed in about the last humanly possible seat on the plane, I didn't reach a phone til around 8:45 Central, at which point noone picked up at Roger's phone. So I piled onto shuttle for the hotel in which Delta booked us, futilely called again, and checked in. After putting all of my stuff in the room, I booted up my laptop and quickly jotted down everyone's dorm and/or cell phone numbers, called a bunch of people, asking 'em to check for Roger online or any other indications that he was still reachable. No go, and my stomach was growling, so I had dinner in the hotel's restaurant at the airline's expense (what a dangerous statement that is! Hee.), and then called again. On talking to Farah the second time, she told me to call Wan, who I'd assumed was at Rutgers with Bee, but was actually home already. Yay! She confirmed that he had indeed gone to the airport, figured out that I wasn't there, and was on his way back to Waveland. After about an hour, we finally connected on the phone and I told him my flight numbers for tomorrow and everything.

So here I am. In a huge room in a fairly nice hotel in Kentucky. Oh, you might be wondering why I'm in Kentucky and not in Ohio, which is that the name "Cincinnati" would imply. I didn't know, either, until I checked out some maps in the lobby 5 minutes ago. See, Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky meet in a triangular sort way with Ohio in the northeast, Indiana in the northwest, and Kentucky forming the southern tip of the triangle. While Cincinnati's the largest city in the area, the airport's actually in Kentucky the way New Jersey's Newark airport serves the City. I think I should stop thinking "Kentucky" with a mocking tone. It's just that I'm instinctively defensive with New Jersey being made fun of all the time—otherwise, the folks here are not, indeed, inbred, and seem to be nice.

The past 36 hours in numbers:
Miles on foot: 21
Miles in car: 150
Miles in plane: 1,000
Phone calls made: 17
Nintendos in hotel room: 1

Oh, and a great big thank you to all of the message relayers and phone buddies tonight. You're awesome.