My girlfriend’s pregnant. A game changer, as they say. As such, we decided to do what many couples do when expecting: take a little trip together before our life explodes (with joy). This is the story of that trip.

The plan was to spend the weekend backpacking. We picked a trail about three hours north in the Poconos and made a pit stop along the way to buy a used bassinet from a couple on Facebook Marketplace. It was summer, and it was hot, and after collecting the bassinet we decided to cool off with an ice cream from a joint a couple blocks up the road. While we were walking there, a woman approached us on the sidewalk.

“Guys!” she said. “It's sunny!"

I agreed with her and kept it moving. She wasn’t wrong, afterall; It was sunny. And while I figured she was just a little kooky or perhaps a touch manic and simply stating the obvious, we later learned that the area had been under heavy rains for weeks. That was the first sunny day they had had in awhile, so she was probably just excited.

Due to all the rain we were warned the hiking trails could be muddy. On the first day, we found the conditions to be pretty good: a little soggy, sure, and with some parts underwater, but we still managed to stay relatively clean and dry. The second half of the loop, however, presented more of a challenge.

Now, if you aren’t familiar with hiking in the mud, it can be difficult both physically and mentally. At first, it’s not so bad. You aim for a dry patch off to the side over here, shimmy across the half-submerged log to that rock over there, and so on, but after a few hours, you start to get tired of having to think so hard about where to place each foot. This usually happens right before you slip and find yourself ankle deep in the muck.

Fuck, you might think to yourself, pulling your foot out with an audible sucking sound. The baby’s gonna cry all goddamn night.

But you regroup, and after slipping again and again, you eventually make it through. Except now you have to climb uphill, longer than you think, and at the top, there’s no great vista, no incredible beauty of the natural world, but there's the car, and you can at least take yourself to WAWA.

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