N: 44 deg 15.530', W: 71 deg 19.143'

Well, we made it up from Pinkham Notch through Tuckerman ravine.  We even got in before dinner was over so we got some good food.  It's a pretty nice hut; it's basically a hike in hostel, but they don't call it that.  It costs a lot more than a hostel, too.  And it comes with dinner and breakfast, so that's not so bad.

Laurie and I got adjacent bottom bunks, so that works pretty well for us.  The bunks are three high -- at least I won't roll out and fall.  It'll also probably be quieter to get in and out.

There are 62 people here plus 5 crew, so it feels pretty populated. However, they normally get more people and have far more crew people, so they feel understaffed -- and underbooked. Of course, 52 people were reserver, so the food was a little light.

We had some slight trouble coming up.  Laurie pulled a groin muscled and I was starting to have some knee trouble.  The hike is a pretty steep climb -- up about 3500 feet (from 2000 to 5500) over 4 miles, and then back down about 500 feet over another mile.  The down portion was causing me some ankle pain, too.

Our friends made it up before us, but family was after us, so we didn't feel so bad.  I'm not looking forward to going down, though, because of the trouble with the little down portion towards the end.  We're looking at other possible options, though, so we'll see.

We just got in from taking some pictures.  The sunset from here is sectacular.  The primary windows look out over an impressive view to the west.  So, Laurie got some pictures of us towards the sunset (with her Canon 30D with 10-22mm EF-S).  Then I grabbed my Canon 30D with 100-300mmL lens to take pictures of the moon.  I got some pretty good shots of it this time, but they still aren't anything like I've seen others do.  One of these days I'll figure out how to do it right.

Our new Garmin etrex Vista Cx was great for the hike.  It shows the elevation graph, the tracks, etc.  It's got much better battery life than our old Vista (non-Cx) model -- and this one has a nice color screen!  It's about the same size, too, so that's a great improvement.  Not only that, but the support for standard mini-USB (the old one had a proprietary serial port) and the microSD (aka TransFlash) slot is a huge improvement.  We grabbed the MapSource World Map for it so we had a somewhat more detailed basemap to use with it while we travel around.

Lights out is 9:30pm, which is fine since we got up at 7am (aka 4am PST) and we're all a bit tired.  They rise everyone at 6:30am, though.  That said, it's not so bad since we're tryin to keep moving our time zone forward since we're going another 5-6 hours forward.

And now I'm blogging on our wonderful Dell XPS M1210 laptop that is getting wonderful battery life.  I think it was worth hiking it up here, too. I didn't need to bring the AC adapter, either, because of the exceptional batttery life.  At 90% remaining, it's showing 5 hours and 30 minutes left.  Well, with no WiFi or Bluetooth the soak up some and the lowest light setting being good enough for here, I don't think there is much of anything that I could do to kill it before I have to go to bed (both because of light's out and because I'm already tired).

My phone (LG VX9800 "The V") is showing between 1 bar and 3 bars of 1x coverage, but I can't get any SMS out.  I doubt the Sprint phone (Samsung MM-a920) would work up here for data connection, but I'm going to have to try since I brought it all the way up here on reports that cell phone coverage works. ;)

As expected, time is going quick now that we're actually on our trip.  Of course, we've not even been in New Hampshire for 24 hours yet, but tomorrow is Friday and it seems like the week just began.  Then again, we kept thinking Tuesday was Friday.  For us, it almost was since we're starting a really, really long weekend in some respects. ;)

I'm not getting some looks for my use of a laptop here.  I'm guessing they don't see them too frequently, but it wasn't too hard to bring it up.  The hut provides food and sleeping material, so you can pack pretty light.  We packed up with warm clothes (it's freezing out, literally), lunch, the cameras, and the laptop.  Oh, I also brought up the Nintendo DS's so we could play those if we wanted to. 

I'm currently trying to play Animal Crossing DS.  I tried to rent through a bunch of DS games from Gamefly before we came, but we didn't get very far.  It was exactly the one I wanted to take with us, but it's not too bad.  It's actually very much like The Sims.  It's supposed to have WiFi component, but I haven't had a chance to try that out yet.  Laurie has been playing Age of Empires and liking it a lot.  I haven't checked it out yet to see if it has multiple saves available.  We also have Pirates of the Caribbean; I don't think either of use have tried that yet.  I was hoping Star Fox was going to be out soon enough to rent, but it wasn't.  I also wanted Advance Wars DS, (wasn't it named after the Gameboy Advance?) but we didn't have enough time to return a game and get a new one out before we left.

Update on the satellite phone: Mobal gave me a call (while I was still able to check my voicemail, too) and said that they had gotten a sat phone in and they were shipping it out overnight to us!  That's excellent and I'm happing with them for giving me updates.  We'll see tomorrow if we get it or not.

Alright, I just got to try out the Sprint phone.  It shows 2-3 bars of digital roaming, but when trying to make a call it drops out of service.  *sigh* Our friends have a GSM phone and apparently they can get calls out.  It sounds like there might be a GSM cell tower on Mt Washington.  That said, I didn't think it was legal for the cell towers to be up like that (except for the old Nextel towers). 

Well, I guess since I don't seem to have much more to write about, I'll go grab the DS... or join in the next game of Jenga.  Not sure which yet...

Laurie's Note Area:

Quote of the Day: Nathan: "Dad, do you have any earwigs?"

Posted by Shane on August 31, 2006 6:03 PM | Permalink