One of my children recently turned 18 which brought my 18^th birthday to mind.  I was hiking with my sibling and we were headed to the next stream to obtain more H2O.  For the map clearly showed a stream, what it didn’t show was that it would be dried up in the middle of August, dam paper map.  That’s when we checked what water we had left and it amounted to half a quart from the 8 quart bottles we carried.  Now we had a mountain to go over to get to the next source of H2O, which took the rest of the day.  It was a glorious sound when we heard that running water in the dark.

At one point we came across a mud puddle and were so thirsty that we had a serous conversation about boiling it up and drinking it.  But we didn’t possess any filtering system, so our thirst didn’t win, after all it would have only been muddy water, I think just the act of camping we ingested enough dirt without purposely doing so.  It was this trip I learned the real value of H2O.  Happy B ’day to me, that was the hottest water I ever drank.