Backpackin'

We got back out to the Green Swamp West Tract and I got my fantasy; it rained.

So what.

I'm glad just to get out. But backpacking in Florida is not the paradise for me that backpacking in the mountains is. I seem drawn to the eastern, temperate zone forests, and always have been. I grew up on flat and sandy Long Island in New York State, flat and sandy just like Florida. Each has the kind of heat where you can smell the hot air coming off of pine needles. But even as a kid, I was drawn to mountains and cool, deep green. I managed to go to college in such an area, and felt so at home there I returned after graduate school, and I am often sorry I ever left.

No matter how many times I get out, and no matter for how long, each time I go out again it is like something brand new and exciting.