Today is the payoff for our last four days and 64 miles of hiking—trail Christmas. Another food drop from Alice. She reads our blog and knows all of or tastes quite well. Bunny had already arranged for Jim Sparks to pick us up at 8:30 to take us to the post office (wouldn’t you know the bus doesn’t run on Saturday’s). Ice Cream is going into Marion with us. We didn’t realize that he won’t be coming back.
Ice Cream is from the Netherlands and he is going home for a while. He seems to prefer to, and is even excited to get to, spend 4 weeks in Sweden with his girlfriend rather than sleep on the ground and not shower while hiking the AT. I can never figure out people’s priorities. He said he is going to come back for six weeks after Sweden so he can hike all the way to Harpers Ferry, WV.
The P.O. doesn’t open until 9 and we have some time to kill, so Jim drops us off at Hardees for breakfast. Bunny and I know we have limited time today in the P.O. because they close before noon. We also know that another 34 pounds is more than we can handle with her new shoes and my aching feet so we decide to ship the majority of it ahead to ourselves in Pearisburg, VA. We think we can make it there in 8 days, but even that would be too much weight for us right now. We plan to carry 5 days with us now, make a small shipment ahead to ourselves for 3 days, and then send the rest to a hostel where we can take the time to carefully sort through everything.
We got to the P.O. with plenty of time to get the package and open it up to our amazement. We have our own grocery store. We immediately dumped all the food we were carrying (we had forgotten what all we were sending to ourselves in Damascus but we knew it was crap compared to our angel). We then picked out 3 days worth to ship ahead and kept the another 5 with us. Then we make a move which we hope is not overly optimistic—we sent all of our extremely cold weather gear home. This allowed us to carry more than enough food while lightening our packs.
We had biscuits and gravy, granola, breakfast scramble, and oatmeal for breakfast. We had gourmet tuna, PB&J, sausage sticks, protein bars, olives, cheese, and more for lunch. We had cowboy pizza, chicken and dumplings, turkey and dressing, lasagna, ice cream sandwiches, and raspberry crumble for suppers. And chocolate! There’s enough chocolate that we could have our own Oompa Loopa to carry it all for us.
And we had non-edible resupply as well. Vitamin I, Benadryl, skin ointments, a new shirt for Bunny, ultra-light umbrellas—we were two little kids sitting under the tree comparing gifts until we realized we were blocking access to the mail chutes. We thought we were hurrying, but we still spent nearly two hours sorting stuff out. We mailed all of our packages and decided to grab some town lunch before heading back to the trail.
We walked the block to Main Street and found a BBQ place with WiFi so we could go through a little mail and find out where everyone else was. As soon as we got connected, we got a message from Postcard. She said she had been trying to catch up with us and had been following us for the last few days. She was in Marion now and was checking if we were still in town. She was with us in less than 10 minutes.
After got all caught up and ate, we called Jim to come pick us up and return us to the trail. We talked with him for a bit before we started hiking. He basically runs hikers around for free, he just asks for a little gas money. Jim is a great guy and meets just about everyone that makes it this far. He was able to fill in details of our missing friends and when they passed through (that’s actually how Postcard found us). He gave us some protein bars and a homemade salve that his wife makes. It’s good for any skin rashes as well as a foot balm—I’ll try some tonight.
We were hiking about an hour earlier than we had planned. It was only 1p. I felt a rock in my show so I stopped while Bunny and Postcard kept going. Before I had my shoe back on, Lady Bug and Stickers caught up with us. Even though it had only been 3 days since we saw them last, we had a lot of stuff to catch up on. Bunny heard me talking and waited to see who I was talking to. While we were having our mini-reunion of the 5 of us, Geo, Summit, and Bear Foot caught up. This is the core of our group these days and we all started within a couple days of each other in February.
Bunny’s and my plan was to just put in 7 miles today and we were definitely going to stop at the next shelter. Everyone else thought they were going to go a couple miles further to shorten tomorrow’s hike. Stickers, Lady Bug, Postcard, Bunny, and me had made reservations for a house tomorrow night at a hostel about 24 miles up the trail.
We hiked together most of the way to the shelter where Geo, Summit, and Bear Foot just got water and kept going. Lady Bug, Stickers, and Postcard stopped to have supper before they continued moving. Gnome was already in the shelter taking a nap. A few more hikers came by (Jackalope, Ripple, and Leap Frog) with only Leap Frog deciding to spend the night. The shelter was OK. It had a privy but it was closed. Sounds like a bunch of shit to me.
EFG