Dreams about going places are always nice to wake up to. I’ll turn the water heater down again as the warmer weather makes the morning more inviting and the evening less painful – going from warm clothes to a cold bed. Caleb will make us breakfast, and then we will go on a two-mile morning walk before I go to work at San Diego Tattoo Supply on a Saturday.

I’ve only got to be there 9am – 3pm. Jacob, the tattoo artist from South Carolina, looking for a job, says he’ll fill out an application even though I tell him he won’t get hired. The owners prefer someone who is going to stick around, and they can’t pay artists’ rates. Caleb is preparing for a night of camping to see the Lyrid meteor shower when I get home.

We go to dinner at Thai Thai in Santee. I eat mango and sticky rice and get my spicy fried rice to-go. A family comes in and asks what the spiciest food is, just to order a 3 out of 10 on the heat scale. Restaurants like this are few, for our neighborhoods, and I’m grateful that for the last decade we have been less than ten miles from a papaya salad and a variety of curries.

With bellies full, we make the drive to Cibbets Flat Campgrounds, a place that gets surprisingly busy during the PCT hike season; something we hadn’t dealt with in our previous visits here. The park is packed with families, groups of friends, trail magic providers, and the thru-hikers for the night. We drove through once and parked in an empty spot; some sites have two, and we watched the carpenter ants crawl over pebbles and twigs that resembled stones and logs to them.

Caleb puts his feet in the cool stream that is rushing by. We know all the campsites are full, and we don’t qualify to camp in the large group, which will definitely take some getting used to when our time comes. We set up our chairs in the middle of the empty field between the sites and next to the vault toilets. In a whiny voice, we hear, “I need some tacos,” as a guy coming from the dusty trail sees the group of other hikers.

We nicknamed the guy Bitch Taco and I wondered what my trail name would be. Watching the sunset was easy, but dealing with the blinding headlamps, phone lights, and smoky to bright campfires that kept our eyes adjusting to the sky was too much to endure. Once Caleb has finished his hot cocoa, we move to the other end of the park and sit near the roadside.

We’re ok looking up for a bit, but when we realize we still have another hour before the meteors become noticeable and then the hour drive home, we decide to not stick around. There’s a part where the trail crosses the road, but there were already tents there. We’ve gotten so used to our solitude that the idea of hiking on a crowded trail, even for a day, was still in our future. I kill four mosquitoes and escape without a bite.