Date: 2014-05-16
From: Still Home

To: Damascus Va.
Miles today: 0.0

It's time for the mailman to head back to the trail! My daughter Meghan and I will be driving down to Damascus on Saturday to experience a little bit of Trail Magic called Trail Days. Its the biggest annual hiker celebration on the AT. We will also be there all day on Sunday and hopefully I can catch up with a lot of the hikers that I have not seen for awhile. I have not hiked since April 27th and I have fallen way behind my old hiker bubble. I don't think that I will ever catch up with them on the trail, they are younger and faster than me, but a lot of them will be in town and I can still say hi and wish them well. I will miss hiking with them but part of life on the trail is about constantly meeting new people and making new friends. When Meghan and I start hiking on Monday I will go back to where I stopped at the 290 mile mark. I think that I can still make it to Maine before cold weather makes the hike up Katahdin seem impossible. Anyway,if you hiked 2200 miles just to get there haven't you already convinced yourself that anything is possible? I thought about hiking north from Damascus and then coming back and finishing the last part of Tennessee this fall but it just didn't seem right. I started out wanting to follow every white blaze north and I am not ready to abandon that idea just yet. The process of climbing the summit in Maine is supposed to finalize your dream and no other place on the trail would be as fulfilling. The reasons for my falling behind are numerous and I don't know when I have ever had so many health issues at the same time. I had severe swelling in my right leg and foot when I left the trail, possibly from a fall on the rocks April 16th. The doctors treated it as an infection in my leg and the pain and swelling went away. About the time I felt ready to head back south I got very sick. It got to the point that I barely had the energy to get out of bed for a couple of days so I finally went back to the doctor. After blood work and a urine test it was determined that I had a viral infection and also suffered from low sodium levels. I don't remember ever being that weak before and I don't know if it was from something trail related but I'm healthy now and ready for the next challenge. The time at home was good therapy for me and I got to see all of the grand kids. I was home to help celebrate Mother's Day but a lot of family members were experiencing flu-like symptoms that weekend so we didn't get to have our big outing in the park. At least I didn't get that bug while at home. I also got some chores done around the house and planted a small garden out back. I watched all ten episodes of Band of Brothers for the first time, and got caught up with the few TV shows that I watch on a regular basis when I am home. I read INTO THE WILD, a book about Chris McCandless and tried to imagine if there were any similarities between his trip into Alaska and my hike on the AT. Obviously his quest was way more dangerous than mine but if I had the same health issues in a remote part of the country instead of on the AT the results might have been just as deadly for me. On a lighter note, my first night back home I got up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom. Forgetting where I was I looked up to see if the stars were out, it had become a habit of mine to enjoy the star-filled sky on my nightly treks out of my tent. At first I thought that it must be a really cloudy night, it was so dark out. Then it occurred to me that I wasn't outside at all, I was standing in my upstairs bathroom!