9/10 -- Arrived in Basking Ridge, New Jersey

We started off with an easy drive today -- only 5.5 hours, so we left around 9am and stopped for lunch at an actual restaurant instead of eating on the fly like normal. We were still going to arrive an hour or more before Dan's family got home, so we scouted places to hike and ended up at Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area, on the border of Pennsylvania and New Jersey. When we stopped on the NJ side, we discovered the only visitor center still open in September was on the Pennsylvania side, so we studied the maps and found what looked like a one hour hike, drove to the trail head and set off. Luckily, I brought a big bottle of water!

Unfortunately, I made two mistakes:  I didn't study the contour map very well and left my hiking poles in the car. Hiking poles not only help with balance in rough terrain, they make your arms do some of the uphill work instead of just your legs, and they can be very helpful for going down steep trails. The path was very rocky and had over 1100 feet of elevation gain, sometimes very steeply, with few actual flatter areas to catch your breath.

Jim on the trail -- already ahead of me,
and the trail only got steeper.

Me in the beginning. It really was a lovely, shaded trail.
Except for the steep rocky parts later.

View from the top - Mt. Tammany

The area was beautiful, but when breathing easily is a challenge, it is more difficult to enjoy it. It took more than an hour to get to the top, and then we couldn't find the supposedly linking trail back down. Jim found another hiker sitting on a rocky cliff overlooking the valley below -- quite spectacular -- and asked directions. Having studied the contour map we picked up by now, I could see that it was going to be steep, but that should still be fairly easy. The rockiness really did me in. In one place, we even lost the trail, which appeared to have been impacted by a rock fall and we had to clamor down a distance about equal 4-5 flights of stairs. I remember really enjoying rock climbing in the past, but this was not so easy or that much fun.

Coming back down, but near the top. My hair is up, and
I am even slower than before. I am NOT posting the
closeups of my face....

We encountered a couple more spectacular vistas on the way back, but in all, it took over 2 hours. The good part was that Dan's whole family was home by the time we got there and we had burned enough calories that we didn't have to worry about overeating at dinner.

We met the family's new dog, Smoke, and got to reconnect with Dahlia and Davin over dinner and getting ready for bed. I loving having the chance to read Dahlia's bed time story.

After bedtime, we skyped with Erika, Dylan, and Jesse. Dylan was a little unclear that we were far away and demanded that we come to visit again soon. Then he took us on a 'ride' in his fire engine -- ipad pointing to the ceiling, he wheeled us around the house. Next he put us inside a scooter where he hides special things. If I hadn't been laughing so hard, I might have felt claustrophobic! We tried to get Smoke to introduce himself to Dylan, but the poor dog was definitely unclear on the concept and not too keen on participating.