The longest hike for Hiking Merit Badge is a 20 mile hike. We can take rest breaks, food breaks, but can’t spend the night anywhere so it all needs to be done in one day.
It’s also November, so we are burning daylight from the beginning and playing a game of beat the clock to get to our destination before nightfall. Just to be safe, we all had flashlights in our daypacks.
The day started out so cold that you needed to be bundled up with a hat and gloves. We stepped off right around sunrise from Morrisville Presbyterian Church and the goal was to head north to New Hope. At the end of the day, we were going to have Mr. Huston pick us up in New Hope and bring us back to the cars in Morrisville.
We are very food motivated, so our hike plan included a stop in Yardley for doughnuts at Cramer’s Bakery, a stop in Washington’s Crossing for pizza, and a stop at Thomas Sweets in New Hope for ice cream. Since we were hiking twenty miles, we needed our strength and motivation. We also had lots of our own snacks and plenty of water with us to keep us hydrated and energized all day.
There was a lot of wildlife along the canal – some native and some invasive. Since the land is mostly flat, we made good time and maintained an average pace of 23 minutes per mile all day! That was a much faster pace than we had in Valley Forge last month.
At the end of the day, we crashed. All of us were exhausted and we had muscles aches in places we didn’t know we had muscles. But, we also had an incredible sense of accomplishment. And for the three scouts working on Hiking Merit Badge, they only have ten mile hikes left to go which feels like it will be a breeze after this.
Scouting is a family affair even beyond Cub Scouts! The five of us who went on this trip were from only two families, and both adults are registered volunteers with Troop 3.
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