Hiking on the Appalachian Trail

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Wensday - Batsh and Shi, a guy from couchsurfing (from Rehovot) that each of us met separately before that (I met him in a meeting in Julie's house) and happened to be in NYC too at the time, came to Warwick and I picked them up from the bus station - I drove for the first time outside of Israel and on a car with a disfunctional manual gear. We ate lunch at camp, organized our stuff and started walking to the Appalachian Trail (that passes about a 30 minute walk from camp). At the beginning of the walk we found a cooler filled with drinks, probably for the trail hikers, but our bags were full with water so we didn't take anything. The trail went into the forest, a huge forest, actually for the entire 2 days we hiked inside the forest which was pretty boring, there were very little places where the forest broke and we could see the view (never happened to me while hiking in Israel...). The trail section we walked in was longer that I thought and it took us a few hours to get to the NJ-NY border, one of the only high points we could see some view from, and had a box where the hikers register and that had inside it also directions to a cabin of a guy that's willing to host hikers. There we also met the first trail hiker - along the trail we met a few of them, people that are walking through the entire trail from Georgia to Maine for a few months, a part of an entire trail sub-culture that were interesting to get to know. We didn't make it to the shelter we were planning to sleep in at night, so we found a rather flat area along the trail, took out our sleeping bags (and food) and camped there for the night. I woke up so many times because of the stones and the mosquitos, but managed so sleep a little (and ended the night covered with mosquito bites). The next day we woke up early and started walking. In a few hours we got to where the trail crosses a road, the whereabout of an icecream place that's famous in our camp, but it was still closed. Since the next part was planned to be done back and forth anyway we just enjoyed the view and moved on. After some more walking we finally got to the shelter we planned to spend the night in, and stopped to eat there. We walked some more in the forest, turned around and ended the trip with icecream at the creamery we were at before. We got picked up by a camp driver on the way back from somewhere and at the bus station I had to say goodbye to Batsh for quite a long time... I came back to camp covered with mosquito bites and with an aching body, but overall the hike was fun, the company was good (but it didn't compare to hiking in Israel). After getting back I went to sleep for a little and got up for a night shift - this night the judaism major ('torah to the max') where doing an all-night-study, so I joined them for most of the shift so it wasn't boring and passed quite quickly (usually when some people are up all night it's quite amusing).
At Saturday night we had another live concert, another reform-jewish-musician called Noam Katz performed (with his acoustic guitar and his drummer) - it was nice hearing live music again but I didn't think that the show was that exciting. Sunday was Israel Day again (for 2nd session), I didn't do any classes this time but I was asked to help do a couple of things, the extra work wasn't really fun to do (building 'ktovet-esh'?!) but we did have at the afternoon chocolate balls and an Israeli dinner that were nice.

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