Day 1: April 13th Campo

We spent the weekend with my (Rebekah) Aunt and Uncle (and cousin Ben!) in San Diego. We had a great Easter, loaded up on some last supplies at the local Walmart, watched Slumdog Millionaire (We loved it) and got some some extra sleep and took out even more weight from our packs.

Here you can see Alex is ever so excited to get on the trail with our final weights of 49 lbs. for Alex's pack and just under 25lbs. for mine. That was still a little heavy but it was including all our food and water (3 liters in mine and 5 in Alex's).

We made the drive to Campo and signed the register and took a few pictures of the border and were on our way. We also met Brian aka "Stinky Butt" and his mom Judy who were hiking to Lake Morena that day too. The trail for the first few miles flew by, the sun was out but it wasn't too hot. Border patrol was out in full force and our spirits were high...no one would have guessed that in an hour we and Stinky Butt and his mom would all be lost, I'd have a bee sting and we would see enough clothes left by illegals that we could fill a Goodwill clothes bin. Soon we all found our way and my bee sting got better. Stinky Butt and Judy went ahead of us not wanting to take a break for lunch because they still had a long way to go...so did we. By the time it was getting dark I had accidently/ on purpose thrown myself onto the ground in the middle of a border patrol access road convinced I could no longer go on. After a few..."encouraging words" and pointing out some danger signs written in Spanish Alex had convinced me we needed to make it to camp. By eight o'clock it was nearly dark and we had made it to Hauser Creek, a "fine camping spot" as our guide book told us. We set up our tent in the dark trying to watch out for the poison oak that was covering everything around us. After going sixteen miles that day we had made it to the creek hoping that there would be water, seeing as how we only had a liter and a half left. Naturally it was dry and no one else was camped there, so we had nothing but the soothing sounds of the Black Hawk helicopters and the crunching of leaves underfoot as the illegals pressed on into the night.