Day 97-99, Saturday-Monday, May 19-21. Stanimals, Waynesboro—Triple Zero

We came to town with the intention of taking a double zero, but this morning when people started stirring, it was me, NOT Bunny that said “one more.” My feet got tore up when my boots failed on day 95. In spite of what some ‘nay-sayers’ (No Worries) believe, I had a tremendous amount of debris in my shoes rubbing between my wet socks and soaked boots. The backs of my heels got huge hot spots on them. I also got blisters on the undersides of my toes. My feet were a mess.

I had also been itching quite a bit the last few days. I attributed it to bug bites but after a day in town, it was apparent I had poison ivy and it was spreading. On Sunday, I woke up and my right eye was almost swollen shut. Bunny wanted me to just suck it up and use some calamine cream that was in the hiker box here. From my scouting years, I knew I needed some bigger intervention than that. I finally convinced her to contact Dancing Dog and get me a subscription for prednisone. I’m already starting to dry up on just the second day. Alice had also sent us some spray that is steroidal, which is, no doubt, helping speed up the process. I remember Jay Hamilton used to say I could look at a picture of poison ivy and breakout.

As a few people may have noticed, I had also fallen quite a bit behind on blogging. A couple weeks ago in a shelter, I was talking to someone who was vlogging their trip. I said I’m doing it the old fashioned way like our forefathers did; I write stuff out daily and upload it with pictures to the internet when I get to town. His response—“That’s so 90s.”

Even if it is primitive, it got Bunny to do the vast majority of the work on this town stop. She sorted out all of the food that our trail angel, Alice, sent to us at the hostel, did the laundry, treated our clothes with insect repellant, and dried out most of the gear. All this freed me up to type to the point of hand cramps.

Stickers and Lady Bug took off on Sunday morning and they are now 27 miles ahead of us. It’s doubtful that we’ll catch them any time soon. Patches is definitely gone for now. When she comes back, she will be 3 weeks behind so our only chance of seeing her is if she follows our blog and comes out to do trail magic in Massachusetts when we pass. Gnome caught up with us today, but he’s debating about going back out in the morning. He has less of a time crunch than we do. He’s walking the AT and if he doesn’t get done this year, he can finish next year. We have to finish this year because we are hiking the PCT next year. Another hiker family is falling apart.

No Worries had to get off trail for a month because of an injury. Not a trail injury. She fell while visiting DC and got an infection. She’s going to start hiking again around June 1 but will jump ahead to her tramily in New York.

Bunny finally accepted the extra day. She even embraced it with a nap this afternoon. We spent a bit of time at a coffee shop this morning before we walked all over town looking for Gnome. It’s hard to find a moving target. We went back to Stanimals and let him come to us. The only other thing we did today (other than go to the P.O. to mail our cold weather gear ahead to Peter and Marcia) was eat…and eat.

Stanimal has some issues with Plod Along, or, rather, vice versa. The experience we had with his Glasgow location has really gotten under Plod Alongs’ skin. We tried to convince him this location was completely different and that we consider it one of the best hostels we have stayed at. It’s water under the bridge now.

We are packed and ready to go in the morning once we have breakfast. Everything is dry with only a 60% chance of late afternoon rain. We’ve made contact with Bob and Chris whom we met on the Camino de Santiago last year. We will get together with them later this week passing through Shenandoah. Right now, my main concern is getting the most time possible in the king sized bed we have for one more night.

EFG