Point Reyes, 25th and 26th of February 2006

		[1] At 1 pm Em dropped me off at Limantour Beach and I began walking south along the shore until Sculptured Beach where I cut up to the Coast Trail.  After a ways along the empty byway I saw scat and exclaimed "DOOKIE".  As it happened, 1 seconds later I came upon people for the first time in over an hour.
[2] My well thought out plan was to meander along, reach Wildcat Camp				[3] late at night, eat, and go to sleep.  However, when I arrived at 4:15 pm I just wasn't ready for bed.  It's not that I went fast, rather, I just never stopped.
[4] After making and eating dinner on the bluff I walked a bit more along the beach to Alamere Falls and almost set up camp at the top.				[5] But I didn't.  Instead I studied the map and decided to sleep on a 480-	[6] foot peak overlooking the ocean.  Said peak is south of the falls and
[7] west of Pelican Lake.  By the time I got to the top it was 6:15 pm, dark, and windy.  I climbed into my bivy and went to sleep.  2 hours later I left.  The wind had picked up and was flapping the bivy fabric so much I couldn't sleep.					[8] 2 hours later I moved again, seems the wind was following me.
[9] At 10 am the next day I met Em somewhere on the paved	[10] of Mesa Road, at a point further south than indicated on the map.	[11] We drove north to the Tomales Bay Oyster Company and	[12] had a jolly good time with the Chez Panisse crew despite the rain.

Don't ask me why I didn't merge cells 5 and 6 along with cells 9, 10, 11 and 12.  FrontPage freaked out when I tried to and screwed the map up, and as you might imagine, I already have spent way too much time on this silly page.  

I think this qualifies as my first successful solo backpacking trip.  Although I missed Em (we were apart for 21 hours) I enjoyed myself despite overcast and cold weather and at night I wasn't afraid of being eaten by dingo's despite being alone a peak rather than in the well populated Wildcat Camp.  In fact, I really enjoyed lying out at night watching the sky and listening to the wind in the bivy.  For me, being in closed off tent amplifies irrational fears.  

Because I enjoyed the bivy experience so much, I was very sad to find significant condensation inside the bivy in the morning, despite the top of the bivy being bone dry.  The condensation caused quite a bit of loss of loft of my down quilt.  Had this been a multiple day trip with no chance to dry out the quilt I would have been screwed.  But it wasn't so I ambled south towards my ill defined rendezvous with Poobie.  At one point I found myself, quite unconsciously, punting along with my stick in my right hand and my left hand in my pocket, as if I was out for stroll.  For some reason this pleased me to no end leaves us with a nice mental picture for ending this narrative. 

In retrospect the story cannot end for while typing this at my kitchen table I have had an epiphany.  I now realize that during that brief moment I achieved a Zen state of pure empty bliss.  "Does even a dog have Buddha-nature?" asked the student.  Poobie smiled and softly said "no". 

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