I had a great this time weekend hiking/camping. There were 6 of us: moi, [[http://www.crhc.uiuc.edu/~gaonkar/|Shravan]], [[http://www.cs.duke.edu/~grit/|Laura]], Yin, Ginger and Ryan.

We left Friday evening and camped out at [[http://employeeprograms.hp.com/little-basin/|Little Basin]]. My camping experience this time was much better than the last—the camp site was much more like the traditional camping ground I had in mind, there weren’t too many people around, the jungle was lush and dense, the weather was nice, it wasn’t hot or dry and we even had an interesting incident with a racoon!

I also learnt a lot about traditional camping practices here in the US—like s’mores or the common breakfast and lunches people have, or quickly setting up a tent and so on.

On Saturday we drove to the [[http://www.bigbasin.org/|Big Basin State Park]] and hiked on an eight mile trail (actually we looped across walking on one trail the first half and coming back through a second one on the latter half). There were some nice waterfalls on the way, and we had a good time walking and talking and lunching together.