Legs and Borders

It was supposed to be a zero day.. and it nearly was! There was few issues I encountered in the afternoon which steered me to hike out of Ashland and I'm literally camping two miles away from the city. The day was way better than expected, I woke up late, dry and clean in a comfortable bed and had a breakfast consisting of marionberry yogurt (a cultivar of blackberry developed and grown only in Oregon), three bananas, few spoonfuls of my old peanut butter to finish the jar and a black tea. After that I found some thread in the hiker box and sew holes in my Camino t-shirt to prolong its life and perhaps even finish the trail with it. Then about 9:30am I went out to join the street parade for the Independence Day which was starting in half an hour. I was surprised by the amount of people that came to take part in celebrations, main street was teeming with people, families 'booked' a space by the road by marking it with a ribbon or chalk the day before. All sorts of community ...

"We do not belong to those who only get their thought from books, or at the prompting of books, it is our custom to think in the open air, walking, leaping, climbing, or dancing on lonesome mountains by preference, or close to the sea, where even the paths become thoughtful." Nietzsche. I got awaken by a mixture of barking and howling from a bunch of coyotes, night in the cabin was quite cold but enjoyable. I got out of it few minutes past five and half a mile later just few hundred feet before the border, California gave me best goodbye present I could ask for, I saw a cougar, a mountain lion!  I never really comprehended just how big that cat is, it was a size of a cheetah, it appeared twenty metres in front of me on the trail and kept on walking in front of me for about thirty metres until it just vanished into the forrest. The cat wasn't in any hurry either it was surely aware of me and just slowly walking away. When it disappeared I got scared that it might suddenly ...