Stephanie's Trail Journal

Wednesday June 9th

Beginning Point: Atkins, VA
Ending Point: Knot Maul Shelter
Daily Mileage: 13.9 miles
Total Mileage: 549 miles
Weather: rained on us during dinner but sunny during the day

We had a brief but fun visit with Mom. She took us to a motel in Marion and was very pleased that all my accumulated dirt scrubbed off in the shower. She said I looked like I lost a lot weight, which I guess I have... hard to tell when you don't use the same scale every time you weigh yourself.

We found a good dinner and some brew at a place called Happy's... I think Mom was amazed by the amount of food we ate. We had the appetizer platter, salads, bread, rib-eye steak and baked potatoes. I polished off every morsel of food on my plate! Then we had dessert to top it all off.

We had an exciting visit at the Marion coin-op... we think one of the laundry patrons was about to be arrested (not sure why) as we were leaving. Dan said he overheard the mother of 2 boys say, "hurry up and get in the car - do you want Mommy to go to jail?" Marion sure is an interesting town.

In the morning we finished up our town errands. Mom carted us to the post office and learned how our bounce boxes work (we break up our maildrops and send stuff to he next town 4-5 days ahead so we don't have to carry it all). Then it was off to the grocery for our perishables. The whole time Mom was shaking her head, telling me that if I ate like that after my hike I would be 200 pounds in about a week. Probably true, too.

In case you are interested, our typical resupply staples consist of the following: 1 - 2 blocks of cheese, a bag of bagels, a package of crackers (triscuits and wasa hold up the best), a package of tortillas, a jar of peanut butter, enough candy bars to last until the next town, gorp, additional oatmeal (often I will eat 4 packets for breakfast) and sometimes a small amount of fresh fruit. We usually get Cliff bars or other energy bars in our maildrops so we don't have to buy those. A treat of late has been instant pudding made with powdered milk - does the trick, and has lots of calcium! It's all about the calories, Baby. It's hard to get enough when hiking. I read that women require 3-4,000 calories and men need 5-6,000 per day of hiking. No wonder I eat every 2 hours out here.

Okay, back to the hiking brief... we left Mom at noon and began our 14 mile trek to the shelter. We had plenty of distractions along the way, including more styles, and we didn't roll into camp until 7:30. The rain began at 7:35, so we had to cook amongst the raindrops.