A Saturday Hike, Two old ladies style

So Chris (Who surely has a more detailed account of this.) and I go out hiking yesterday and oops, get on the Appalachian Trail (How exactly did we end up on the AT and how long did it take us to realize that those highly visible, bright white blazes were not the blue ones we should have been following?) and it gets very dark and increasingly colder and although we have two flashlights, an apple, two scones and a bottle of water, we're thinking the sign pointing 17 rocky miles one way, 8 the other doesn't bode well, so we follow the supposed .2 mile (This is only .2 miles?) billy-goat climb down to a hostel where Fairfax Station Boy Scout Troop #994 just happens to be having dinner (Okay, I'll have a just a little.) of tasty chili and fresh fruit salad and chips and olives and . . .Then two kindly scoutmasters, one with a GPS and the other an SUV (These culturally recognized abbreviations are not technically acronyms according to Julia since they do not form an identifiable word.) drive us back over and around the ridge to the Friends Wilderness Center where we'd parked our car and incidentally meant to be hiking, just when Sheila Bach, the Resident Manager of the Center who we've yet to meet but turns out to be an accountant (Who doesn't need an accountant?) and a lighthouse aficionado who has herself yet to meet Old Barney, my childhood lighthouse, and whose son went to the same Quaker boarding school that my brothers and I attended, is on the phone with the Sheriff to figure out how to begin to find the two old ladies that meandered into the woods several hours ago and never came back.

So that's what Friends are for.