Backpacking Part 2
After making camp that night and chowing down on some cajun chicken, we retired to our tents. I woke up the next morning around 6 to the sound of the bells and shadows rolling across my tent. I unzipped the flap and looked out to see a herd of goats walking through our camp. After taking it all in for a few minutes, I found the shepherd and had the normal conversation, this time without Psalm 23 quoted since my partner was still sawing some logs in his tent.
After the good start to the morning, we all packed up camp and headed out. Surprisingly, it was pretty chilly. Never mind the fact that it's the dead of summer, I guess our elevation was high enough for us to be pretty cold. The wind was biting. Not to worry, though, since I had stolen a jacket from another team guy before hitting the trail.
The second day went a lot like the first. We walked a lot, talked to shepherds, then walked a lot more.
As the day dragged on, though, we started running into a pretty serious problem: we didn't have any water. We hadn't passed any natural fountains, and nobody was carrying much water. I had half a liter left on me, but I wasn't about to drink it. For all I knew, that half liter was going to have to get me through the next 3 days.
With no other option, we stopped trekking and split into search parties to find some water. Finally we found a small creek, and after chasing it for a kilometer or so, we found the source, another natural fountain. We pumped out some clean water and headed on.
The trail took us next to a dry creek bed, which we ended up following for most of the day. We didn't see many shepherds along the creek bed, but it was a lot more fun walking there than up and down mountains.
Nothing too eventful happened, we passed through some beautiful countryside after coming up out of the creek bed. We were all getting used to our packs, and they didn't seem as heavy as they did the day before. We continued on, covering a lot of ground.
