Mt. Washington trip report (Sun 2 May) - Hector and Ivo
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At 6am Ivo and I packed for a day trip up mt washington.  We felt bad that
we did not say good by to everyone, but weighting that against waking them
up, we decided for the former.  We started the hike at 7:45am, noticing
the  large amounts of canadians (a bus loaded with 50 of them!!) on the
mountains. We went up the Lion Head trail.  Started easy, but after a
little while it got pretty steep.  There was a little snow at the bottom,
but closer to the summit there were many snow fields.  Close to the
summit, Hector practiced self-arrest skills on some snow fields, even
gave unsolicited advice to other people praticing up ahead.  We finally 
reached the summit at 12:45pm.   As we unpack the bag for eating, we
noticed that the 2qt bottle of water was not tightly closed and that the water 
we expected to drink in the way down was decomposed into smaller particles
spread throught the bag (ie spilled).
We descended through the Boott Spur trail, with fabulous vistas of
tuckerman ravine.  Through Hector's binoculars we noticed that there was
some sort of American Red Cross people there, maybe practicing or helping
someone. While going up, there seems like the whole world goes skiing in
the ravine.   Finally made it down at 5:00pm (I think).  
We went back to the cabin, we were ready to finish cleaning up, but were 
pretty tired after the hike.  Thankfully, the cabin was pristine.
We finally headed back to boston at 6pm.

around 9pm, as we are crossing the NH MA  border, Hector's car suddenly
went off.  That is the engine stop.  We pulled over, and failed to start
the car.  Finally a cop pulled over and called a tow truck for us.  The
truck would charge us $120 to bring the car to boston, or $55 to take it
to their service station and have the car looked at the first thing in the
morning.  Considering my financial situation I opted for the latter. After 
dropping off the car, we wanted to go back to boston, we called the state
police to see if the could give us a lift, they laughed; we called a taxi,
they would charge us $60. Finally we decided to take the bus.  The nearest
town with a bus was 6 miles away called newburyport.  The tow driver gaves
us a lift to the bus station.  
We necided to sleep, we did not feel comfortable sleeping outside of the 
station per se, so we found a patch of grass behind some salvation army
dropboxes at the end of the bus station.  This is 30 yards from the
highway.  We tried  to get some sleep.  We got a wakeup call by a
policeman at 5am, wandering what were we doing.  We told him, that we were
sleeping (obviously, from the fact that we were inside the sleeping bags),
we also told him our story...
Finally we caught the bus at 6am.  
        In the end it seems like the timing belts of the car broke.

This is it for our fun experience sleeping in the open...

Hector and Ivo






