May 27th, 2023
Since this time I wanted to get a Cooking merit badge requirement that has to do with trail cooking, the night before the hike I got a lot of trail food ready. Since it has been getting warmer, I didn’t have to wear as many layers or pack as much as the last two times. Also, this time the Wilsons unfortunately weren’t going to hike with us this time. We left at 7:00, and got there around 7:30. We started the hike at the Fullerton Woods parking lot at 7:40, and soon we were singing “one hundred bottles of beer on the wall” loudly. It was about 70 degrees and sunny, and a nice day. When we got to Schiller Woods South, we ate our nutella/peanut butter tortillas. The first section of the hike took longer than we had planned, which made Cora a little nervous, because she had homework she wanted to do that afternoon. We were next to the road, so we passed under a couple of bridges, all covered in graffiti on the inside. Under one of them, mom found a bouquet of flowers right next to the river that were actually pretty nice, so she decided to bring it home. I remembered that we still hadn’t brought out the snacks for the Cooking Merit Badge, so I brought that up. But then we agreed that we’d bring them out gradually. The hike didn’t go perfectly smoothly, though. Several times, Cora and Lydia got too far ahead, and had to pause for us to catch up, a factor of the hike going slower than we hoped, making Cora more and more stressed about her homework assignments. So when mom heard this, she decided that Cora, Lydia and I could walk ahead and not be slowed down by her and David, and we could walk all the way to the Fullerton Woods parking lot, the parking lot that we left the car at, and Cora could get some homework done on her computer while they caught up. This is when I put on the big backpack with all of the cooking gear and the four of us continued the hike, but mom drove to Sunset Meadow Bridge so that she didn’t have to hike the whole 10 miles. At the stop I made lunch using the backpacking stove. Joshua, Aaron and Elise arrived in time to eat with us, but they mostly wanted the trail snacks. We talked, then packed up our bags and cleaned the bowls and left for the last mile of the hike (they didn’t know they weren’t doing the full ten) with them. We finished up most of the trail snacks, but I forgot to get out the seaweed. We were done hiking at 1:15.
If you want to see how I mapped the route, my Merit Badge Counselor showed me this link that’s very helpful.