June 20, 2008

Cool day. Still in kind of a bad mood all morning as I did the 7 miles to reach US 33 and hitch a ride into Elkton. I'm in there by 1, and decide to eat at Dairy Queen. I order the large milkshake, and they bring me a bucket of dairy product of a size and viscosity well-suited to firefighting. Unwisely I drink the whole thing, and I'm queasy all afternoon.

I get to the Post Office and my repaired hammock is there, thankfully, so I pick that up, mail back the loaner I've been using, send off journals and postcards, and head back to the highway to wait for a hitch back ... and wait, and wait. 45 minutes go by before a white Sedan finally pulls over. I run up, open the door and hear "Chainsaw!"

I've not mentioned Raffle Queen before, which is an oversight. I first met her some 600 miles ago, way back at Overmountain Shelter on the TN/NC border. She was out doing a section hike then and we chatted over trail magic. What I didn't know then was that she was a trail angel herself (trail angels being the people who provide the trail magic; the exact theology of it is a big confusing).

I ran into her again at Daleville a few weeks ago when she was riding around with Lipstick, my other recurring Trail Angel. She actually participated in returning to me a shirt that I had left in Catawba three days earlier - someone recognized it as mine, and it changed hands a couple times before finding its way to me 50 miles up the trail.

And now I run into her again, as she is on her way up the road to the trail to provide trail magic. She's got a WWJD bracelet and a case of free beer, which makes her pretty much my kind of gal; too bad she's married ... (RQ: How old is your daughter? Can you set me up?)


June 21 - 30, 2008

Okay, so things here are going to change. Without my really planning on it, this journal has become pretty much exactly what I wanted to avoid - a daily weather report & mileage log. Frankly, writing that stuff has become boring for me, which means it has to be deadly tedious to you. So instead of trying to write daily entries, I'm just going to write every few days about what's happened lately. So, for instance, in the last few days, I have:

-Finished the Shenandoahs. A lot of people hated them, because the views are surprisingly, not all that good. My solution - spend part of every day walking the Skyline Drive, which runs parallel to the AT for 100 miles...

- Saw my first three full-sized bears of the entire trip on three different occasions over 5 days. Two ran away as soon as they saw me, but another was directly on the trail, and he just sort of kept meandering ahead of me for 15 minutes. I don't think he grasped that he was in my way. I'd close to about 30 yards, and he'd move up the trail, stop for a spell, then look surprised when I followed him.

- Hitched a ride into Front Royal with a guy named Larry who was going into town to buy a new car. We stopped at 7-11, and he bought me coffee and a donut. In the afternoon, after I resupplied on food, ate lunch, did laundry and checked my email, I hitched a ride back out of town - and got picked up by Larry, in his new car.

- With summer arriving, there are a lot more people out here doing section hikes, and thru-hikers continue to drop out. One night, I camped with four other hikers - I was the only one doing a thru.

- There is an infamous section north of the Shenandoah called "The Roller Coaster." It's a 13.5 mile stretch with 10 ups and downs. None of them are more than 500 feet or so, so I thought must be overrated. I was wrong - very rocky and with summer heat and humidity, it was as tough as anything I've done anywhere on the trail.

- After spending parts of 2 days in the Roller Coaster, and some poor water management leading to semi-dehydration, my last day heading into Harper's Ferry was brutal. When I reached the Shenandoah River, I took a soak for the better part of an hour. I checked into ATC headquarters as thru-hiker #488 for the year. That's about average for this time of year, they tell me.

- For the first time since visiting my parents two months ago, I spend a night in a house. I'm met in Harper's Ferry by the Angel family, old family friends from back when I was a kid. They've been following the hike closely, and graciously offer to drive out to HF, pick me up and host me for a much-needed zero day, my first in almost 2 weeks. After a Saturday dinner where I drink ridiculous amounts of iced tea, I spend a Sunday stuffing myself, resupplying and napping. Monday it's back to the trail.