May 25

     Today has been a great day of hiking! I started off the day with a great view since we camped next to it that night before. It was kind of our first hiking day without rain or waking up in a cloud. It was really nice having a dry day, however it did turn out that without the rain it was a lot hotter out. We did a 23 mile day today with some pretty steep hills but pished it all yhe way. The last 6 miles or so were really beautiful, all along a ridgeline with a view most of the way.
     We are going to really have to push it to get to our goal of meeting up to hike with everyone on the 1st of June. We will probably have to hike 23 mile days everyday to get there. Its going to really take some convincing on my part to get Dayglow and Son to push the mileage but I think I'll be able to get the to stick around.
    I am thinking that instead of the staying at the priest shelter Thursday night and hiking with everyone the next day we will probably make it to the spy rock campsite and hike out from there. It will probably be nicer since I am hoping for a big group and it will also mean we wont have to hike 29 miles the day before to get there. Well I am really excited to see everyone, make sure to break out and break in your hiking boots soon!

My Trail Diet

     So I thought I would let you all know just a little of what I eat while I'm out on the trail. Just to make it clear a lot of the time I have to keep in mind how many calories something has, is it going to be too heavy to carry and will it last without needing to be refrigerated.
     I usually start my morning off with something easy like a pop tart or a cliff bar, something I can eat on the go. I like to be able to get up and hit the trail as soon as I'm packed up. Usually throughout the day I keep a few snacks at easy access on my hip belt such as peanut m&ms, twizzlers, goldfish or fritos honey bbq twists. For lunch I usually do some sort of extra sharp cheddar cheese and summer sausage. It tends to be that the sharper the cheese the longer it lasts without refrigeration. I usually wrap the sausage and cheese up in a tortilla or put them on ritz crackers that I get in the small fresh packs as they call them. Then for dinner I usually eat some kind of Knorr pasta side, mac and cheese, or ramen. Pretty much some kind of pasta. Then I eat a candy bar for dessert. That is pretty much my diet so you can see how hikers are always craving real food all the time and eat so much when they come into town. I just thought I would share my diet, and I know that y'all might think its a little weird but unless you have someone dehydrating foods for you at home and mailing them to you this is pretty much every hikers diet out here.

May 23

     It has been a lot of fun hiking these last few days. We were able to get back in to Damascus, Va to be able to go to Trail Days. It took us about 3 hitches to get into town but it really wasn't that hard. What made the trip easy was that a lady named Road Angel decided to take us most of the way there just because that's where we needed to go, we didn't realize she wasn't already going there until we were already on our way. She is a super nice lady and we really appreciated the ride.
     Being at Trail Days was a blast. We were able to see all our hiker friends again since they all came back from wherever they were on the trail. We also got to relax a lot and talk to all the reps from all the companies where all of our gear is from. We apent a lot of time "hanging out" at the Eagles Nest Outitters area where they had a lot of hammocks set up. I think Son and I actually ended up selling a lot of hammocks for them. We were hoping they might give us a couple of their pro nest hammocks but no luck. We however did woo over the girl that was selling the hammocks and she ended up giving us all a ride back to the trail where we left, which was a long way away. She was a lot of fun and made me think a little better about ENO then I did before. When I was at Trail Days I was also able to get a new pack and sleeping bag and send some things home to lose a total of 8 pounds off my pack, which is really awesome because now my pack is extremely light.
     We have been getting to a lot of really great camping spots and awesome views since ww have been back on the trail from Trail Days. We camped at an awesome campsite near a waterfall one night and had a great fire there. I need to make sure I go back there sometime when its a bit warmer because it looked like a great place to swim and spend the day.
      Well I'll have to fill everyone in with more tomorrow because I'm falling asleep while writing. Hiker midnight is 9pm by the way and it is 936 right now. Goodnight everyone!

May 14th

     30 miles yesterday! I don't think that I will be trying that again for a while it is kind of hurting today. Son and Dayglow both did it with me. After 26 miles my body just really starting breaking down. We decided to go 30 because we heard you could ordr pizza at the next shelter from the one we were at when we had already done 20. So when we got there I called up the pizza place and they said their policy was that they couldn't deliver to where we were past 7pm and it was already 845pm. Well with some shmoozing and begging I was able to convince them to come out. The pizza was well worth the 30 mile day.
     Today we did about 12 miles to get to Atkins and we stayed in a place called the Relax Inn which ended up costing us about $18 a person. I didn't really want to stay and spend the money but it was supposed to be a horrible thunderstorm later so I gave in. Turns out the weather report was right and all of a sudden water just came pooring out of the sky. All I could think about was man I'm glad I am not in my tent for this.
     Well not many more miles till we'll try and hitch back for trail days. I'm getting pretty excited about it, lots of people are saying its really fun. I hope everyone is planning on coming to Halls Hovel to come camp with me for a couple days it'll be really nice to see everyone.

May 12th

Today was a pretty nice day with great weather, first blue sky in a while. I hiked with Dayglow, Son and White Wolf today since I was able to meet back up with them at the shelter last night which was really nice. We had a great day of walking through mountaintop balds again with really great views. We hit some trail magic right around lunch time where a guy was grilling up hamburgers and hot dogs, the classics never get old, which were delicious. My favorite part of the day though was when we came across some wild ponies on top of the mountain. The ponies were actually really friendly and enjoyed licking all the salt off my arms. We came into the shelter where we were going to camp and there were lots of people there and realized it must be a weekend. We camped a little ways past the shelter and made a pretty big fire. Today was a really nice day, a little different that Tabb wasn't with me but I think this alone time will be nice for me.
-Turbo Toes

May 11th

     Well I started on my solo adventure today. Tabb and I separated at around 3pm when I headed back on the trail and he decided to finish there as a section hiker. It feels weird withought him being here, a bit like he is still in town and I went too far and now he has to catch up. I ended up hiking a lot further on the trail than I planned when I left, about 6 miles extra. I just got into camp at about 9pm and am now too tired to make dinner so I decided I'm just gojng to skip. The good thing about pushing it further was that I got to meet back up with Son and Dayglow and some of my other friends. Everyone said that they are going to really miss Tabb but understand why he is finishing up now. Well Tabb (Jonathan), thank you so much for starting this trip with me and we will always have great memories from our days of hiking together.
-Turbo Toes

It took about 500 miles and about two weeks of processing for me to be sure but I have decided to become a section hiker.  This weekend I stopped walking the trail. 

I love meeting and getting to know the fellow hikers on the AT.  I love the camping and the views everyday.  I love the exploration and living completely in the moment.  The problem is that I really dislike the walking. 

I came for the adventure but I found that I was bored with the slow pace and lack of variety in my days spent alone trudging through the woods.  So I've decided to return to society and begin preparing for graduate school in the fall.  I spent this past weekend with my brother getting ready to separate.  I gave him the communal gear that I carried, had a goodbye meal with him, then I walked Turbo to the trail head and watched the red backpack disappear into the woods.  I am confident in my decision to stop my thru-hike but I had such a longing to continue when he walked away just so that he wouldn't have to do it by himself.  Sad moment for me to part from him.  I realize he'll be continuing with the 30 hikers we've formed friendships with but this will really change the feel of the hike. He will definitely be faster though not slowing down and waiting for me to catch up every two hours.

I'm spending this week in Charlottesville with my baby sister and her fiance. While I'm here I'll be working on school scholarships and finding a place to live in the fall.  I'm looking forward to reconnecting with friends and family in Norfolk next week. 

So I still enjoy hiking and being out in nature, but I think I'll limit my future hikes to 100 to 300 mile trips.  I'm planning on driving out and joining Turbo for a few especially nice sections.  Second week of June doing the Priest and some trail magic for the other hikers.  Friends and Family camping with Turbo right after the Priest.  Maybe go do Mt. Washington in NH also. 

I think some big things I've gotten from this trip is a stronger desire for casual adventures, meeting strangers can be a very good thing, and a bit more confidence in hitch hiking as a legitimate form of transportation.

Thank you for the support you've given to both of us.  I'll be turning into a spectator now, clicking on that spot link figuring out how far Turbo has traveled that day.  Looking forward to his stories of adventure and what the north holds for him.

-Tabb

Trail To Damascus

     Wow it has been a long time since our last post, I am very sorry for that. We got to the point where we hadn't written anything in a while and we knew we were going to have a lot to say and I felt that I would just wait till I could get on a computer instead of write a long post on my cell phone. Needless to say this will be a long post but after you get through this one I am going to try my best to get daily posts back out there, even though you will probably see multiple posts on the same day due to the fact that I won't have data service to post them everyday.
     We left from Hot Springs about 2 and a half weeks ago and were able to get picked up by our new friends Michael and Debbie Rayl from Sams gap. They picked us up and we had a blast staying with them. They were great hosts taking us all over town taking care of all of our needs with gear and food. When they took us to the REI we were able to return then buy a lot of new equipment. Well I just returned shoes, Tabb returned almost everything that he had. The main changes were that Tabb switched to a hammock and we both switched to quick drying trail runner shoes from what we had before. Debbie and Michael were great sports and waited very patiently at the REI, I think we were in there for about 3 hours. Afterwards we went and picked up a couple pizzas at the Mellow Mushroom, which supposedly is a chain down here we have never heard of, it was delicious pizza. We went to church with them the next day and then kind of just slept all the rest of the day. Debbie took us back to the trail the next day after first stopping in Erwin, TN so that we could pick up some care packages that our mother and sister sent us (Sorry Aunt Donna we heard that you sent us some cookies there but we could not find the package anywhere, I'm sure they would have been delicious though). We really appreciated the hospitality that Debbie and Michael showed us and it was really great to meet them as new friends.
     We have been experiencing the most amount of rain on the trail within this last couple week stretch than we have so far on the entire trip. We left Sam's gap and were hiking better than ever now with our new shoes. It took us a couple of days to get to Erwin but we decided that we would skip right over the town since we had enough food to get to the next town following our plan. Its really hard to skip over a town when a cheeseburger is only a half a mile away. It turns out it was a good thing that we skipped that town because we heard from a lot of hikers that it was kind of a vortex and people were getting stuck there for days withought wanting to get back on the trail, and it gets expensive staying in towns like that.
     After we left Erwin we were heading into a pretty tough area of the trail with a lot of elevation change making the trail pretty tough. We hiked a couple of days meeting a lot of new people along the way since we were about a day or two behind the rest of our normal group. We left one day from an area named Cherry Gap Shelter were we planned to hike to a shelter named Roan Knob shelter at the end of a very hard climb up a mountain. I had been hiking in front of Tabb for the entire day ended up actually passing the shelter by about a mile and a half. The shelter sign was very hard to see and I hear that a lot of people actually hiked past it. The mile and a half that I hiked past the shelter was all down hill with fist sized gravel which was really hard to walk on. I got to the bottom of the hill where there was a parking lot when I realized I had hiked too far. I waited at the parking lot for about an hour and a half thinking that when Tabb saw that I wasn't at the shelter he would have realized I missed it and hiked down himself. Well, he didn't think that way and waited for an hour and a half before I decided to just hike a little bit further to a campsite that I saw on my map. The whole next 4 miles were walking across mountain top balds and I wanted to camp on top of one of them. As it turns out the camping spot I was trying to camp at was off a side trail that went a half mile off the trail. I wasn't going to do that so I decided to keep hiking. By this time I decided I wasn't very far from a really cool shelter that we had heard about but decided it was too far to get to that day so I decided just to go for it since I seemed to still have plenty of energy. When I got there the shelter was amazing, it was an old red barn that had been converted into an AT shelter and it had an awesome view (you can see pictures of it in the photo album). I ended up hiking an extra 7 miles past the shelter that Tabb and I had planned on staying at and I knew that he would be mad at me, however the view at that shelter made it worth it. I stayed at the shelter until I met back up with Tabb at around noon the next day and he was pretty mad that didnt hike back up the mile and a half to the shelter he was at when I realized I had gone too far. It was all right though because we had another beautiful day of hiking through mountain top balds.
     At the end of hour day we hiked into a beautiful bed and breakfast which also ran a hiker hostel called Mountain Harbor. It was a really cool house with horses and goats. They took the top of the barn and converted it into a hostel for hikers to stay at. We ended up just camping there however since the hostel was full, still being allowed to use the showers though. The next morning we had an amazing breakfast which the owner made (there is a picture in our album). We headed out of there around noon since it had rained at about 7am and we were all waiting for our things to dry out. Once we got out we started hiking with a small group who we have actually been hiking with for a little while now. There is Orca who is from Portland, Or, Dayglow who is from Massachusetts or  "Mass" as he says it, and Son who is from Washington state. Since the bed and breakfast we hiked through a really cool area with lots of waterfalls.
     After a few days we ended up at another hiker hostel called Kincora. Kincora is run by a man named Bob Peoples who is a legend on the AT. He built the entire hostel from logs that he dragged off the property. Bob Peoples is one of, if not the largest AT volunteers our there. He does work projects on the AT every Tuesday. We had a great time there and got to hear lots of stories and good advice from him and Baltimore Jack who was staying there helping Bob out during the busy season. We left there that next morning and headed down to Watuaga Lake. We hiked about 10 miles that day before we set up camp close to a rope swing which some local Hampton, TN boys put up. We had a blast swimming in the lake, going off the rope swing and just chatting with some of the locals.
     Once we left the lake we had a quick couple of days to enter into Virginia. We caught back up with some of the group that we had been hiking with before we met Son, and Dayglow (we have kind of been on and off with Orcha since Franklin, NC). We stayed the night at the shelter where they all were since it started raining as soon as we arrived. The next day we decided to push for Damascus. We did our first marathon day going just a little over 26.2 miles, I'll have to pick up my sticker when I get home. It was a hard day doing that many miles, oh and it rained the entire day as well. We stayed in Damascus that night at a hostel called The Place. The next day we were glad to hear that our awesome friend Ray Inman was able to get us a room at the Holiday Inn in Abingdon, VA which is only 10 miles from Damascus. So we hitched a ride into town and man did that hotel feel good!. We were able to walk about a mile down to the cinema in town and see the Avengers which was a great movie and a great break from the trail. Im planning on hiking about 10 miles today once we get back into Damascus.
     I updated the care package locations and also posted about 50 new pictures for everyone to look at. My father said that he was going to try and get everyone together up at Hall's Hovel around the weekend of the 9th and 10th of June as I am pushing to be hiking right through there at that time. I wanted to welcome anyone that wants to to come hike The Priest section of the trail with me just before that weekend. I plan on staying at The Priest shelter Thursday the 7th and then do the hike the next Friday, leaving around 8am. If you would like to do the hike with me I would recommend staying at the shelter the night before and hiking out with me in the morning. If you would like to do this try and contact me before and I'll let you know about what you'll need to bring and how we can organize it. Once again sorry for the long post and that its so late but I will from now on try and blog daily.

-Turbo Toes