service of gratitude and civil war history hike

Yesterday I attended the Service of Gratitude for the first year DPT class.  This service occurs after the first semester as a Thank You to those who anonymously donated their bodies to science for use in the anatomy lab.  I chose to attend since I also was able to learn from the cadavers used by this year's anatomy class since I helped out in lab 6 or 8 times this past summer.  It was a very nice service with three musical tributes and two speeches from the first year students.

Today was one of the few Saturdays where I didn't have to work, so I collected a couple PT school friends (3rd year) and one climbing wall friend and we headed out to Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park for a hike.  None of the first years could make it as their White Coat Ceremony was today.  It was the site of a battle in the Atlanta Campaign with the Confederates eventually losing the city of Atlanta to the Union Army.

The weather was pretty much completely overcast - we all expected it as we had individually ascertained that there was a 70% chance of thunderstorms.  Not too hot, but mercilessly humid.  Unfortunately, we chose a day where the trail club was doing trail maintenance, so the area surrounding the visitor's center was very crowded and noisy, as were the first mile and a half of the trail.  Thankfully, it got a lot quieter as we went along.

morgan and marius by a cannon along the ridge

paige looks like she might be up to something

yellow demarcates our route

On top of Little Kennesaw Mountain, Marius pointed out that the sky was getting pretty dark.  We stopped and looked all around at the sky, consulted a smartphone weather app, and decided to press on.  Shortly after we crossed Burnt Hickory Road, Paige suggested we take the next turn to loop back since Morgan had a dinner to attend this evening.  As we were hiking back, it rained a bit, but not hard and not for long.  We stopped for lunch at a collection of logs, and then made our way back to the start.  After looking for a while at the map, I believe we went just over 6 miles round trip.

We made a brief stop at the visitor's center, and then walked back to the overflow parking lot where we'd started.  Paige's turnaround suggestion timing was prescient - it started raining again right after we left the visitor's center building, and was pouring by the time we got back to the car.  It rained hard off and on for the entire drive back, and was an absolute downpour when I got home.

So, another successful hiking trip.  The weather didn't lend itself to photogenic scenery, so those were actually the only two photos I took.  Now it's time to gather my materials and think about studying for Wednesday's "Quiz!"