Miles today: 22.5
Total miles: 1517.3
HAPPY HALLOWEEN! I’ve been looking forward to Halloween on the trail since July. I’ve been excited to hike in costume since then. Given that, you’d think I’d have an amazing costume. Unfortunately I didn’t come up with some brilliant costume idea and instead made my costume decision based on what I could find at the store. Unfortunately I waited too long to look for a costume and rather than having a decent selection at a Walmart or somewhere, I had to make do with the selection at a grocery store. So I ended up buying cat ears and face paint. Delta refused to paint whiskers on me this morning so I spent a good 15 minutes using my phone as a mirror trying not to smudge black paint all over my face. I forced delta to dress up for Halloween too (I’m such a kind hiking companion, I know). I gave him the face paint and told him to come up with something as I set off hiking.
The morning started out with a huge climb that I ascended way too fast and wore myself out on. Not to mention, it was pretty humid so I was sweating a bunch but I had my whiskers painted on my face so I couldn’t wipe my sweat without messing up the makeup so I was just a disgusting miserable mess by the time I got to the top of the hill. I took a break and waited for delta. When he finally appeared i burst out laughing. He’d painted what he said was supposed to be a delta, the triangle symbol, on his face. But it looked more like a huge black circle around his mouth and over his nose and he looked like Hannibal lector or something with a muzzle on. I could not stop laughing at him even when he was clearly unhappy at being forced to paint his face and not be able to wipe his sweat. Good times.
We stopped for lunch at a shelter and found basically a homeless guy living in the shelter. There are a handful of trail bums along the AT that often claim to be hiking but usually in reality are just kind of moving shelter to shelter, hitching into towns along the trail, etc because they have no home. This guy, whose name was Foot, claimed to be thru hiking and said he was almost done and would finish in about 200 miles in Damascus VA. We were slightly suspicious of this but oh well. He was only carrying ramen and tuna for food and kept eyeing our lunches. He saw Deltas smarties candies (of which he is carrying literally a pound, so muchfor hiking light) and kept asking for more smarties. Foot must’ve taken half a pound of them. He was a strange character who overshared personal stories of his troubled childhood and later alcoholism. He was pretty harmless though and ended up being the only person to see my cat costume.
It was a long day today especially after such a short day yesterday so I was exhausted by the time we got to the shelter. It rained overnight but had stoppe by the next morning–the ideal rain schedule!