Date: 2006-03-21
From: Hands On Network, Bay St. Louis, MS

To: Mobile, AL
Miles today: 0.0

Linc here:We're not hiking yet! Our ride to Georgia and to the trailhead is lined up though, picking us up here tomorrow. We should be starting on Thursday (23rd). We are ready, ready, ready!We spent our last two weeks as volunteers, working out of St Rose De Lima Catholic church, in Bay St Louis, MS. We served as the cooks for any and all volunteers, working from around 5:30am until around 8pm each day, planning, purchasing, transporting, preparing, and cooking healthy meals from whole foods. Most people loved the food (stir fried veggies with venision, whole wheat pancakes with oats, bananas and nuts, sourdough bread, roasted veggies, whole wheat spaghetti with homemade sauce, chili, cornbread, etc), and those that didn't enjoy it at least admitted the food made them regular! We really enjoyed those last two weeks, getting to know local people, hear their stories about the storm, supporting other hard working volunteers. We also got to take a morning off and go kayaking with two volunteers and Ham and Bill, two local men that owned kayaks and a truck to transport them in. We kayaked up a bijou in the Pearl River WMA, saw many birds, flowers, and an alligator!In the end, we felt guilty at leaving, so much left there to do, so many people in need. We still felt we really needed to get hiking, so here we are.We are planning a number of mail drops of food for the southern portion of the AT, as there doesn't seem to be much in the way of towns or grocery stores close to the trail for the first few hundred miles (except for Hiawasee and Franklin).We've purchased, repackaged, and shipped 20 days worth of food to various post offices, hostels, and outfitters located along the trail in Georgia and North Carolina. Linc also had to return a pair of convertible pants that he'd ordered from Campmor. Hopefully the correct sized pants will be waiting for us at Neels Gap when we get there. We are attempting to hike the AT on a very limitied budget ($600/month), with minimal planning, while eating food that is as healthy as possible while shopping at local grocery stores, supplemented with some wild edible foraging for greens and teas. As such, we've done no food dehydrating this time.In line with our frugal philosophy, we are avoiding purchasing any new gear if we already have something that might work. Linc's sleeping bag is a 20 year old North Face Blue Kazoo, that he used on his first through hike in 1986 and on several shorter trips since then. Our beat up cook pots are from his 1986 hike. We are both wearing old internal frame packs, Linc's an old Dana Designs, Jeanne's an old North Face, both scarred and patched from lowering down cliffs in Utah canyonlands. Jeanne bought her hiking boots yesterday at an America Thrift Store for $7.88. Our stove is a much abused Primus multi-fuel, a wedding present from 1999. Our tent is a North Face Clip Flashlight, circa 1991. Water filter, an old Katadyn, with a cracked ceramic cartridge. Our only new gear is as follows:- Campmor 20F down bag for Jeanne, less than $100- Keen sandals (purchased on Ebay) for Jeanne, for $53- Target sandals (Keen imitations) for Linc, $25- Walmart hiking boots for Linc, $25- Target trekking pole for holding up poncho tent vestibule, $15- Sil-nylon Poncho tarp, for use as a tent vestibule, around $30- No camera, just small notebooks from Walmart for use as journals.I guess less than $300 in new gear.After I enter this, I'll try to figure out how to post our mail drops, which you can access by clicking the mail drops link at the left side of our journal.Thank you for following along on the hike, and we wish you all good energy in following your own dreams too.