Final Expedition
Group Journal Entries
(We were often too tired to write at night--*** denotes stuff I've added)

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September 28, 2004
Day 1
Written by Alex

    What a day.  Where to begin?  Let's start with frozen toes and fingers at 6:30 AM with one bowl of meusli and the longest sunrise ever.  We got a briefing [from Andy and Andreas] that seemed to last forever in the freezing morning, and started later than planned.  We began on an easy but very steep hike.  We finally saw the sun and it opened our eyes as well as our shirts and voices.  With a new song and warm weather we were well on our way with time to spare when out of nowhere came a wrong turn that turned into an hour and a half in the wrong direction.  Kaboom! and silence.  We found our resupply looking like starving children.  We finally got our lunch and packed up our food.
    We got going to set up camp when we ran into another problem: the trail on the map did not exist where the map said it did.  After some exploration we decided on an alternate route.  Susanne spoke with some crazy lady who was lost earlier.  We now have found where the trail exists for real, and set up camp in a flash.  We are now awaiting our meal which is all too common but that is our only means of food for the next two days.

***Where we camped: near town next to a river.  Some of us went to a nearby restaurant, where we made friends with a very interesting and very talkative man from Venice.

September 29, 2004
Day 2
Written by Erin
    Well alrighty then.  We woke up yet again with no sun to say hello to, and another bowl of meusli.  It turns out that trail 561 is, how do I say, special. 
    I wonder if Andy and Andreas had something to do with the picking of this particular trail.
    The day has been long and very hard.  We are weary and worn from the day.  We have another one tomorrow--yay!  Get excited and load up on the carbs.

***We hiked beyond our planned destination and found a winter room.  Unknowingly, we kicked out our instructors, who'd planned to stay there themselves.  We made a campfire and read Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire as we ate pasta and drank hot chocolate.  We each had our own bunk bed that evening.  It was a great day.

September 30, 2004
***We camped along a road after meeting Andy for a fuel resupply.  There was a hut/restaurant across the street.  The girl behind the counter was cute and made the guys drool.

October 1, 2004
***Our last full day of hiking...and the most demanding one of the trip for most of us.  The route was very long.  We ended up hiking down a cliff in the dark with only 7 headlamps for the 10 of us and very little water.  Our cell phone wasn't working because the bill hadn't been paid, so we couldn't text message our instructors as we were supposed to.  We finally arrived at our hut at about 10 PM. 

October 2, 2004
***We hiked down to the trailhead where we briefly met up with our instructors.  Then we hiked several additional miles to Longarone, where we managed to catch a bus to Cortina.  There we enjoyed gelati and took the city bus to Camping Olympia.