Notes
Chris and I hit the Catoctin trail starting at the Tea Room for the first time. We ran into 3 groups of unusuals and fortunately Donnie. First, we asked a "Ranger" how to get to the Blue trail from the Tea Room. He didn't look like a Park Ranger and didn't sound very confident. He looked like someone who had killed a park ranger, taken his truck and was then looking to kill us. We avoided him and went through woods and miraculously got to the trail. We then got down to the lower parking lot. Asked 3 "hikers", actually two hikers, one with massive tattoos and one guy with Marty Feldman like eyes where the trail was. (Turned out to be right there) The third person was a woman who was not hiking, not really doing anything except working on her "wood chipper" a la the movie Fargo. Got away from them and headed down hill. Met the final Unusual, a woman with a German/Austrian accent who was walking, get this 7 big Greyhound dogs all at once on the tough Catoctin trail.
Chris said all we had to do was whistle and the dogs would have taken off, poor woman. The good news was we ran into Donnie coming up from Hamburg road and he stuck with us or we would have been incredibly lost. Donnie was nice enough to run down and then back up to the Tea Room with us and then all the way back to his car.
So, quite an adventure. More Catoctin running to come.