I walked the first ten miles today in two and a half hours. Nothing was sore, my feet didn’t hurt, my shoulder didn’t get tired, I was listening to music, it was overcast but dry 65 degree air, and smooth trail. Pretty much the best 10 miles yet and they put me at the first shelter of the day for lunch and just shy of 600 total. The only bother was an overabundance of spider webs hanging across the trail – this wasn’t the first day getting sticky silk strands draped across my forehead and arms but it was one of the worst. With the trail being so smooth and either flat or gently graded I spent a good part of those ten miles swinging my trekking poles up high in front of me to knock down webs. Mostly there’s just one strand hanging across the trail, but occasionally there’s a full blown web right in the trail. Of course all this is really only an issue for the first person walking a particular stretch of trail each morning.
Strider didn’t catch up until the shelter for lunch today, we took a nice hour long break before braving the now sunny skies and afternoon heat. The last eight miles seemed to drag on, but once again I encountered Punkin doing her trail magic. Today she showcased an odd bit of magic – a giant costco size bag of pure kale and a bottle of caesar dressing. I guess it’s something you can’t really get much of on the trail, but it’s not exactly standard trail magic fare. I did eat a bowl of it while relaxing on one of her chairs. We made it to Dismal Falls shortly after that and the first thing to do there was go swimming. Super cold water but quite refreshing after an 18 mile day. Miranda and Landon weren’t too far behind us and they grabbed a camp site nearby ours. They came down to hang out at our camp spot and we made another fire even with a lack of much wood larger than big sticks. We were winding down and throwing the last of our sticks and twigs on the fire around 9 just as it was getting dark when I thought I heard people approaching. I thought it was Miranda coming back from her campsite, but it turned out to be DJ, Lauren, and Elliot just finishing their hike. Apparently they started late, stopped for a long lunch, and ended up doing 20 miles. Lauren saw our fire, and made us all quite happy by announcing that they had fixings for smores leftover from their trip to some kind of campsite/hostel last night. We scrounged around for a few more sticks to keep up the fire and roasted the marsh-mellows. Yum!