The Worst Day Ever

I'm writing about“The Worst Day Ever” to get it out of the way. We were recently asked what was the most memorable experience, and our immediate response was “Well, worst memorable experience or best memorable experience” because worst was easy. We are still scarred by it.

You must understand, every hiker ever, wherever they have hiked, has a horror story. Whether it is due to weather conditions, animal encounters, getting lost, or getting hurt, no one is unique in their bad experiences. We all tell the stories with the utmost detail and intensity, but we’ve also heard it a thousand times from others. I guess I’m suggesting that this story isn’t actually as badass as I make it sound as I tell it because we are not unique in the experience. But you know what, that’s crap. Just because so many people make similarly bad judgment calls and end up in a bad situation, it doesn’t make our particular experience any less intense.

It took place on the North Carolina-Tennessee border. We had just spent a night at an awesome bed and breakfast/hostel with two of our favorite southbound hiker friends. There were a couple of reasons why we set out that next morning in spite of the imminent bad weather blowing through. 1) The hostel didn’t have any space for that night and was in fact overbooked and 2) there were a few other hikers in the hostel that were driving us absolutely crazy. Sometimes you just meet people that you don’t click with and these people sucked. We even left the place a little earlier than we originally planned just to get away from them. (For the record, on the surface these people were perfectly nice. There were several things that just rubbed us the wrong way. But I feel bad complaining about them, I’m sure they are good people. But I look back on them with a lot of malice.)


(This is a photo I took of the hostel/bed and breakfast that was so great)


Anyway, we only had something like, 8 miles to go for this day. We were heading up to a shelter that we’d heard rave reviews about for hundreds of miles. It was an old barn that had been recommissioned as a shelter for hikers. It was supposed to have the best views and was so big it could sleep as many people as was ever necessary, which was great because space could be an issue in places that only slept 6-8 people. It was going to be a short day, which should have meant an easy day.

As you might expect, it was the opposite of easy. The last 2.5 miles of the hike that day was on a bald. A bald is a mountain that naturally doesn’t grow trees. In the southern Appalachians there is no treeline like you find in the north. So, the only times you get 360 degree views is when there are just meadows on tops of mountains, and these are called “balds”. What would have been an awesome view for over 2 miles turned into hell. There were 70 mph winds blowing sideways without trees to break it up. It was raining initially, but the windchill made the rain freeze to your clothes, hair and body. You were soaked within minutes because the wind drove the rain into you, all on one side (so really half of your body was dry for a while until osmosis took effect on the fabric of your clothing). I was bracing myself hunched sideways, my backpack acting as a crappy parachute trying to carry me away with the wind. My hands were so frozen that I couldn’t hold my hiking poles for fear of frostbite on my fingers, so I held them under my arms like a rifle. We were all running on the wet, icy trail and we could only see 15 ft in front of us.

This lasted for probably about 45 minutes, until we got to the shelter. When we got there we were all freezing, soaked and completely shaken up and it was only 2:30pm. There were two people already in the old barn. One was a guy who was doing a “wilderness experience” on the trail. He started somewhere in North Carolina, tried to live in the woods hunting and gathering but found it too difficult to sustain himself. He hiked north and stopped and worked at different hostels for room and board. He also hiked barefoot. He had a pair of Keene sandals, but those were just for emergencies. He had hiked in the day before when it was nice weather, saw the awesome view, took a picture of it (which he showed to us on his iphone...I know...wilderness?), and decided to not hike out when he saw how bad the weather was that day. In hindsight this guy was pretty wacko, but at the time it was awesome because he had collected a bunch of dry firewood and was an expert at making fires. The other guy was in his 60’s and from Alabama. He was clearly pretty well off and had a lot of adventures in his life. He had been hiking for 4 weeks on the trail north and planned to do one more week. He just arrived from the other directions, which was similarly horrible.

We all put on our dry clothes and set up our sleeping bags. Sol and I were the only ones with a tent, which we planned to sleep in to capture our heat. We were lucky, since this old barn had tons of cracks between the wood, and there was a big door opening that had no doors, which let in the wind (and by the morning, the snow). We all were sleeping on the second level. On the bottom level there was a narrow hallway and we set up tarps like walls on two sides to create a wind block and built a fire between them. We all hung out around that fire until dark, only leaving to get food or (god forbid) pee. We went to bed at like, 6, and used all of the tricks we had learned to save heat. We were wearing all of our dry clothes, we had our sleeping bags (at this time they were rated to 20 and 30 degrees but the temperature was well below that), and we lined our sleeping bags with trash bags that we kept in our packs for extra waterproofing to act as extra insulation. We had picked up some handwarmers from a shelter in Virginia a couple hundred miles earlier (you think in terms of miles, not time at the point), and we threw those in our packs. We also boiled water on our stove and put it in our water bottles and threw those water bottles in our sleeping bags. We were comfortable enough to sleep all night.

The next morning we woke and all of our stuff that was outside the tent was frozen. Solid. Our boots were frozen, our clothes were frozen, our packs were frozen, the condensation on the tent from our breaths = frozen. It had been lightly snowing and there was a film across most of our clothes as it blew into the barn. It was miserable. At this point, the guy with no shoes was calling people to get a ride off of the mountain and we were all ready to jump on that bandwagon. There was a hostel south of the mountain that offered rides to-and-from the trail that he had just worked at for a couple of weeks, and then there was the hostel just north of the mountain that we had stayed at the night before. In the end, it worked out that the hostel we stayed at was able to pick us up. The husband that ran the hostel/bed and breakfast was dropping off a truckload (literally) of hikers at the top of the mountain. Poor suckers. On his way back, he swung around and picked us up on a road that led up to just about a quarter of a mile from where our shelter was.

(We were afraid that our camera was frozen -and it was- but I took this one picture of the experience the next morning through that open doorway from the second floor of the barn)


We had an hour to kill, but we were in pretty high spirits at the promise of warm coffee and being inside. We all paced around the barn, with our frozen boots on, trying to thaw them out. It was the most painful thing I had to do. I was almost in tears, it was miserable. In the end we got our ride back to the hostel and it was awesome. There was one other hiker there already heading south who decided, due to the continually crappy weather, to solicit a ride to the next legitimate town along the trail. We decided to hop on that train, since we were more interested in forward progress than waiting around for the weather to clear up in a couple of days. We were broken and beaten and we just wanted to hang out in a hotel, with our own rooms. We ended up staying there for two days, drinking a ton of beer, watching a ton of tv and eating a ton of McRibs.


(This speaks for itself. Hotel. Beer. McRibs)


Other of our least favorite things:
-Getting a wet butt. This happened from the rain falling down my pack cover and dripping onto my butt or from my water bladder leaking from my backpack.
-Butt chaffing. The wet butt didn’t help with this.
-Putting on wet boots.
-Being cold at night. Waking up in the cold may have been worse.
-Bugs buzzing around your head all night, and people snoring all night and mice scurrying by your head all night.

Adjusting after the AT

I am excited to begin writing on this blog again. After finishing the AT it seems like a cool medium to share different things that I learned with my friends and family. I figure I’ll use it as a way to answer all the questions that each of you are asking, as well as just talk about different things I’ve learned as they are revealed to me.

Since being off the trail people are always interested in the superlatives: What was the best part? What was the worst part? What was your favorite state? What was the scariest animal encounter? I’ve been fielding these questions, many of which I don’t have a clear answer for, as best I can. Some have obvious answers that stand out bright and clear in my memory (most likely because I am scarred by them!), with others I find myself sounding like a politician deftly maneuvering around the question, talking about several related (slightly off) topic points that I am more comfortable with. It’s just really hard to figure out what the best part was! It’s really easy to figure out the worst part. These posts will come in due time, I’ll try to do about one a day until I run out of topics. So far I have a brainstorm list of things I’d like to write about. They include (off the top of my head):
The worst day ever (as expected)
The best day ever (this will probably be some rambling about how I can’t figure it out)
The things they carried (everyone asks what we packed, and it changed over time)
Trail lingo (there is a whole vocabulary accompanied with the AT)
The least wilderness-y wilderness experience (about how many people hike the AT to have a wilderness experience, but how I think that is impossible on this trail)
Trail culture (the elusive and difficult to explain subculture surrounding the trail. this might also warrant a Trail Names post)
The lessons I’ve learned (still figuring this out)
A typical day (also a popular question)
Sausage fest 2011 (life as the only female for 3 months)
What 500 miles felt like, and 1000, and 1500 and 2000
NOBOs vs. SOBOs (the difference between those who hike north and south)

Anyway, if you have other ideas shoot them at me and I’ll write about it. Maybe one with our recipes and food ideas, or one with the towns we stopped in.

For the first post I figured I’d address the question of “Is it hard getting back into real life now that you’re done?”

The short answer is “no”. I know, disappointing. It’s been over 3 weeks since we’ve finished the 5 month journey, so maybe it is too soon to tell? But still, there was no shock to the system, no pained re-figuring out how to function in a house and with cars. There is a slight chance that it just hasn’t hit us yet that you can’t just stop walking 20 miles a day after 152 days and feel like everything is normal.

I figure part of the reason that the transition feels so smooth is that we were pretty connected during the trip. I would email, facebook and text every time we got to a town, which was at least once a week. I would even call and text from the trail if I felt like it and we had service. We were also constantly receiving letters from people on the trip, and we were taking videos of the journey with the rest of the world in mind. Therefore, we were very cognizant of the world beyond the trail and vicariously interacted with it as we documented our trip.

Another reason that it is an easy transition is that we were such lazy slobs whenever we went to towns, we really never forgot what not hiking felt like. We’d hang out in a hostel or hotel and watch tv all day, order pizza and drink beer. It felt like any other weekend that you just wanted to relax. We also bought an AM/FM radio in Front Royal, VA so we listened to NPR in the morning. Between tv and radio, we were more tuned in to news than I was in college. We also were up to date on all the new South Park episodes this season. We also caught a couple Republican debates. We heard all about the Occupy Wall Street movements around the country. Really, we didn’t miss any of the headlines, we just felt a serene sense of detachment since it was so far from our present worldly concerns. It was great (not so great now).

Finally, hiking by the end just felt so normal! It was like having a job. A job you enjoyed. A job where you set your own schedule. Yes, we did have people point out to us how lucky we were, “You can take a vacation day whenever you want!”. And some hikers, I’m sure, cringe at calling it a job. However, I’m just trying to express a certain feeling where you wake up early in the morning and you know you have stuff to get done (i.e. hike 20 miles). You can’t dilly-dally too much or else you won’t make it to your goal. You push through rough times (rain, cold, wind) in order to complete the objective. You are tired and go to bed, wake up and repeat. Then you get time off (i.e. going into towns for a night or a day) and you freaking love it like it’s TGIF every time. Ya know what I mean?

Luckily I never got sick of hiking. I literally would be walking, my poles clinking next to me as I took my steps, watching the trail disappear before me as I walked forward through an ever-changing landscape of woods, thinking “I can’t believe I’m not sick of this.” I really wasn’t. Ever. I was bored sometimes and in a bad mood, but we’d stop and change things up a bit and continue and everything was good again. I wasn’t itching to finish by the end, but I was also ready for it to be done. I think it was probably just the right timing to finish the trail and 1) not be jerked out of a different sense of reality brought by hiking for so long and 2) not be overdue for my life back in civilization, which I’m sure carries its own consequences.

Hilarious collision of worlds

As many of you know, my boyfriend, Sol, and I just finished hiking the Appalachian Trail (from Maine to Georgia). After five months of hiking, I subjected my wonderful and supportive rugged outdoorsman to a weekend hanging out with all my college friends in NYC. NYC just 2 weeks after finishing the Trail smacked us in the face with a very plugged-in, metropolitan lifestyle after nearly half a year in the same clothes, with no electricity, wandering through the woods. Needless to say, he was a little out of his element, but he's always a good sport and truly does appreciate the company.

Before we left NY to head up to visit his parents in Maine, we visited our friends Priscilla and Brad. Priscilla gave me two books to read, one about Chelsea Handler's evil pranks and one by Mindy Kaling about life in general. In the past she has given me some great Chelsea Handler literature. Absolutely hilarious, dirty and girly stuff (some of you had the opportunity to hear me read portions aloud when it was just so ridiculous)....not exactly Sol's normal reading repertoire.

However, during our 2 day drive from NY-NH/NH-ME, I started reading "Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns)" by Mindy Kaling, who plays Kelly from The Office. It was so hilarious from the very beginning that I started reading it out loud to Sol as he drove. In those two days I read the entire thing to him in the car. Hilarious, because some aspects of it are so far from anything he ever cared about or thought about, but a lot of the stuff is just straight up funny enough for both of us to enjoy. And each time I picked it up, he insisted I read it out loud to keep him entertained. Anyway, there was the most epic paragraph ever, and I had to share it with you.

Imagine Sol driving his Subaru outback, me reading, the car on the back roads of Maine. We've made it to page 163 at this point. So you can get an idea of the type of stuff we're dealing with, this section of the book is called "The Best Distraction in the World: Romance and Guys" and the sub chapter is called "Guys need to do almost nothing to be great". Also, imagine me reading it with the sassiness that I imagine Mindy had while writing it. Here is the paragraph:

Forgive me, but being a guy is so easy. A little Kiehl's, a Bumble and Bumble, a peacoat, and Chuck Taylors, and you're hot. Here's my incredibly presumptuous guide to being an awesome guy, inside and out. Mostly out, for who am I to instruct you on inner improvement? Let me say here that if you're some kind of iconoclastic dude who goes by the beat of your own drum, you will find this insufferable. I totally understand this. Buy why are you even reading this book at all? Shouldn't you be hiking the Appalachian Trail right now or something?

Amazing moment. Thanks Priscilla, thanks Mindy.


Here's a photo of Sol, in all his glory, hiking in the AT in VA. For anyone who reads Mindy's book, specifically this chapter, you can decide for yourself how well Sol fits into her "awesome guy" vs. "iconoclastic dude" breakdown.

German Colony, Jerusalem, 13 January 2011 (never fly Aerosvit)

Oh my god. I don't know where to begin. It's has been a crazy crazy past days. I'm so behind. We'll have to go in order from the last thing notable, which was the hiking trip to the Negev that Paul and I did.

The Negev and Jerusalem:

Everyone got about 4 days off because a small part on the drill rig broke and they had to wait for it to be shipped from the states, but it was a weekend, and it's international and they actually still haven't started drilling again. So last Friday was our last shift and Paul and I went on the night shift because they needed two scientists just in case they cored, but it took 3 hours to get 30 cm with the broken part so they decided to close operations. The next day was supposed to start my days off before leaving on Tuesday, but we had a field trip with all the students, my dad and Moti to look at the local geology and formations around the Dead Sea that we are drilling. So instead of beginning our hiking trip and having two nights in the Negev, we ended up staying in Ein Gedi that night. The next morning my dad drove us to Mitzpe Ramon where we began our overnight hike. We hiked down the big crater (maktesh ramon), across some cool old volcanoes, sandstone and carbonates, an awesome fold and fault and into some other dry streams. We ended up camping in a spot that isn't officially accepted and unofficially had a fire, but it was totally worth it. It was a clear and beautiful night.

Then the next morning it was surprisingly wet everywhere. My sleeping bag was totally covered with drops of water. We hiked out in a couple of hours and then hitchhiked from the road up to Mitzpe Ramon. We were picked up by an Army guy and his dog in a pick up truck. He ended up taking us all the way to Be'er Sheva, where we caught a bus to Jerusalem. He was great, he told us all about the Bedouin culture, local cool valleys, the desert and his time in the army. We arrived in Jerusalem in the afternoon and walked into the downtown. We were a site. We were covered in desert dust and dirt, probably stinky, with our huge backpacks. We had three goals: 1. Get some falafel, 2. Paul wanted to buy a poyke (a cast iron pot/goblet, what I'd call a dutch oven), 3. find a phone somewhere to call Moti and tell him we were coming. We were successful on all fronts and even got to finish off the night with a walk around the Old City of Jerusalem with Jason.

Flight Adventure:

The next morning I went to the Tel Aviv airport to fly back to New York via Kiev. First of all, I almost missed my shuttle because I set my alarm for an 4:30am rather than 3:30 am like an idiot. Moti rushed into the room yelling "Emily! You will miss your shuttle! You must get up!" and I made it but my driver wasn't happy. Then in the airport I went through a lot of security, and extra security, and checked in, more security and finally got to the flight and on the plane.

I should have noticed things were weird because originally my flight to New York was supposed to leave Kiev at 12:55pm, but our boarding passes now sad at 3:30pm. Then when I arrived to the tiny, horrible airport in Kiev, the flight wasn't listed because they only had listings going up to 2:30pm. Then over the intercom they said all New York passengers should come to the information desk, they herded us to a lounge with couches upstairs and told us that our flight would be leaving at 1am and they would give us food in an hour. This was all in Russian though, and they didn't explain anything in English, once all the other passengers (who were Russian, Kazakhstan and Georgian) calmed down some of them told me in English what was going on. It was horrible. There was no information, no reason, no internet and no way to get information. They gave us a cell phone to take turns to call our families and whoever to let them know.

At around 4pm they told us that we wouldn't be leaving until 7pm the next day. This is when big unrest began. The passengers united and all went down to the information desk and started yelling at the young girls working there. They demanded information, a reason, a flight, whatever. At this point I started to make friends with these Kazakhstan guys who spoke English pretty well. I asked them to keep me updated with whatever was being said since no one was speaking English, only Russian. Then they started to book everyone on flights to Istanbul and Stockholm for the next morning, but still with no prospect of making it to New York within the next day, it would be a day or two it seemed, possibly three. I was totally miserable at the prospect, although I was ready to go to Istanbul, where it was at least a bigger airport and had more flights back eventually. The problem really was that Aerosvit has no sway in flights. They have almost no ability to make anything work or better for the passenger if something goes wrong.

So I decided it would probably be better if I just fly back to Tel Aviv (they had a lot of flights for that) than to go to Istanbul or New York. I was missing my connecting flight to Texas the next day regardless, and who knew when I'd get to New York. My Kazakhstan friend helped me ask the women working on the flights to get me back to Tel Aviv and I managed to fly out on the last flight at 10:35pm. I arrived in Tel Aviv at 2:00am, had my luggage lost and ended up getting a place to sleep with a guy I met on the plane. I started talking to him when we were boarding and sat next to him. He was really nice and he offered that I have a bed to sleep in because he lived with his parents and they had extra rooms, plus he was half way between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem and would drop me off at a bus the next morning. It worked out great, I have been very lucky this entire trip with the people that I meet. I have a lot of built up generosity to share based on what I have received. I think that is important and one of the best things about traveling and life. This trip has definitely been marked by these interactions.

Jerusalem again:

The next day I managed to make it to Moti's house, where Paul was still hanging out because drilling has still not resumed in Ein Gedi. So Paul and I went to the Hebrew Museum and saw the Dead Sea Scrolls, the archaeological section and the fine arts section. Then we bought a bunch of ingredients to make Moti's family dinner that night, to say thanks for letting us stay and taking care of us. We made sweet potato gnocchi from scratch, with two different sauces. Obviously it was mainly by Paul's guidance since I've never made gnocchi before, but it was quite easy and I would be able to do it again (and I plan to). It was a nice dinner, then we rented a movie and fell asleep watching it and went to bed.

Today we toured the old city of Jerusalem again, this time in the daytime. Paul had already done it the day I was stuck in Kiev, but he did it again anyway. We started from Mt. Olive, walked down through churches and cemeteries and into the old city where we walked through some underground aqueduct systems and then into the Austrian Hostel where we could go to the roof and see a view over the old city. Then we went to the western wall, past temple mound where the line was too long to get in, and then through the Jewish Quarter and out. We walked to this market that we found on the first day through Jerusalem where there is all the food you could want and just bought whatever looked good. Fresh breads with cheese and spinach, chocolate croissants and cookies, dried fruits and finally a falafel sandwich. I was stuffed. I still am stuffed. Now we are waiting for a couple of hours to go to Ein Gedi, where we should be on the day shift tomorrow (hopefully there are the parts necessary to make everything work again). I do hope to get in some shifts before I leave.

8th January, 2010

We had visited the small maktesh, (maktesh being the name for the craters here that I couldn't remember before). It was awesome. Jason, Paul and I joined a field mapping course that was being led by one of the principal scientists on the drilling project. He is a geologist at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and overall a super awesome guy. He has his mapping course with this best friend (also a geologist of the same age and equally badass) at a primitive campsite in the desert, going over some intense terrain. The students really enjoy it, but it's not traditional.

We received the most amazing treatment and time there. We arrived haphazardly, without food, with only our packs and our clothes. The faculty on the trip very graciously gave us food, wine, coffee, and sleeping bags. It was incredible. Then they set us up on some great hikes around the area that they said we couldn't leave without seeing, so we didn't even do the mapping course with them in the end. We also were lucky enough to meet this guy named Micky who does all the trail maintenance work in the natural reserves across Israel, so he knew all of the trails by heart and told us of good places to go.

It was wonderful to be back in the desert, sleeping outside under the stars, waking up to sunrise and so forth. Now the Negev and the Mojave are two of my favorite barren deserts, although the Sonoran and Colorado deserts are also beautiful, they just have more plants.

4-Jan-2010, Ein Gedi to the small crater

I haven't figured out the name of the small crater that we are going to, but I have it written down on a piece of paper in my coat in my room.

Today Jason, Paul and I are going to join a field mapping course that is going on in the south of Israel, in the Negev Desert, at the small crater (there are big craters too). Amotz is a geologist at the university in Tel Aviv and he leads a week long field mapping course for 2nd year geology students, and we will join them for a day or two to check out the geology.

Otherwise, they are moving the drilling platform from the middle of the Dead Sea to offshore by the kibbutz. There have simply been a lot of weather problems preventing the team from drilling at an efficient capacity, so they hope to bring it closer to the shore in order to bypass bad winds and waves as much as possible.

Originally the team wanted to get the deepest core possible at the deepest part of the Sea, then when they were unable to penetrate deeper than 450m, they wanted to start a new hole to try to fill in the gaps missing from the first hole (you don't recover 100% of the sediment when you drill), and potentially go deeper. This is where they hit problems and we moved from Hole A to B to C...until we finally ended with Hole H and it started working again. We've drilled 40m or so in Hole H and now they want to move to onshore in order to correlate the layers they find in the middle of the Sea with their stratigraphic counterparts close to shore. Today they are moving the platform and setting up, so we are not missing any work as we go for our field trip.

The big bad news is that my roommate, Elitsa, had her computer bag stolen from out front of our room. She has had a string of bad luck. She was using my dad's camera in the lab to take photos of the core and document everything. That camera went missing last week and it seems that it must have been stolen. Then my dad asked that I give her my camera so she could continue to work, so I did two days ago and yesterday she had her camera, my camera and her computer in her briefcase when it was stolen. She set it outside our room on our front table, was in the room for 10 minutes and when she came out it was gone. She's been really torn up about it. At the hotel they have very little that they can do. So I won't have a camera to take photos for the rest of the time I think, but I will be with people with cameras, so no problem. I just feel really bad for her.

The past couple days I have gone out on the day shift. It would have been nice if we could core, but somehow the weather decided to change and get windy during the day as well. Steve the driller didn't drill while the winds were very strong because they are on to their last drilling tools and can't afford to break anything. So two days ago all we did all day was watch movies, waiting for the wind to go down. There were three drillers, me and Jason, all stuffed in the drillers cabin around a laptop--needless to say, a cozy situation. Cozy, stuffy and dark. But it was fine, just lazy and kind of a bummer because the winds never let up so we didn't get anything accomplished. Then yesterday the morning was pretty windy, but by the afternoon it was nice and we were able to core a little bit. Mainly salt, but some mud. It's very slow to core through the salt because the tools have a hard time cutting through and retaining it all.

On another note, I'd say that emotionally and socially I've been doing well. I'm overall being quite outgoing and keeping in a good mood. When I got here everyone was pretty burnt out and within my first week I'd say it only got worse. Things weren't working well, everyone had differing opinions and plans were changed all the time. It was a stressed out and negative atmosphere a lot of the time. I was still fresh and happy and just glad to be here so I did my best to just go around an be happy and smile a lot and talk to people. That's what I've managed to keep up for the most part and I like to think it helps a little. More recently I've gotten frustrated at times and I'm tired of hearing people complain and be negative. But when that happens it is usually short lived.

It's crazy to think that I've been here for 2 weeks already. I only have one week left. The project is continuing later than originally expected, so I might end up leaving the project early in order to travel a bit, but a part of me feels like I should stay and help as much as possible. I definitely plan to come back to Israel, so if I don't get to see everything I want to see then I will have opportunities later. It's great. I'm a fan.

1 Jan, 2010

Happy New Year! Everyone has been telling me about the superstition that your new year is decided by how well New Year's Eve and New Year's day go. I think that's a load, but even if it were true, I'd say I have a good feeling about 2011. I think mainly because I've been thinking about it for the past 4 years, but I no matter what, I think it will be a good year.

It's been a few days since I've updated. I honestly have no recollection of the 29th of December. I'm pretty sure that I got off the rig at 5pm after being stuck out there for 24 hours. So the 29th ended with a beer and sleep. I know that on the 30th I had a night shift with Jason and the night drill team. We actually got core! It was unclear when we arrived whether it would be a successful night or if we'd just continue to track how the rig was moving via GPS. But for whatever reason everything finally just went totally to plan and we had a successful, busy and no-sleep night. The best kind. We felt so great, everyone was in such a good mood, joking around and working hard. I also got semi-addicted to hearts solitaire on the computer in the down time. Overall, great night. We didn't retrieve much core, but it was the first bit since I've been here.

During the day on the 30th I went swimming in the Dead Sea for the first time. It was great. I was really careful to not get anything in my eyes, but some splashed on my face and burnt my chapped lips pretty badly. I was talking with some of the drillers and they were saying that to set up the rig they had to spend the better part of a day in the water to put things together. That would be miserable. My 20 minute dip was well worth it though.

So jumping back, we got back to the kibbutz the morning of the 31st. I spent most of my day in a daze because I hadn't slept in close to 24 hours. I took a 3 hour nap in the afternoon, but I woke up to not miss lunch. I decided to go for the boat ride out to the rig with the night shift, but I had the night off so I didn't stay. We said hi to everyone, and I rode back with the day shift. My roommate and I have been on pretty opposite schedules and it's been a bummer because I really like her. So last night we hung out, got a beer at the bar and eventually other people joined us as we approached midnight. Then there was free champagne, strawberries and a few fireworks by the lobby. I crashed pretty close to 1am though, I was still running on very little sleep.

Then today Jason and I planned to do a hike since we weren't working. Moti showed us a good half-day loop. We were able to climb half way to the top of the mountains and then go up a canyon a bit and back down by several waterfalls. It was fantastic. The weather has cooled a bit so it's not too hot, just right for shorts and a tshirt while hiking. We saw tons of animals, it's all the same three-- capras, hyraxes and foxes. Then we stopped at the ancient synagogue, which dates back to the 1st century A.D. Unfortunately everything was in Hebrew so I don't really have a story to go with it, but photos are up on facebook.