Date: 2013-09-26
To: Life After the Trail
Miles today: 0.0
Weather: scattered clouds

I have now been home 2 weeks since finishing my hike on September 13, and must say that life after the trail is a bit weird. Fortunately for me, my friend Chaos whom I hiked with for about a month early on, called and said he would like to spend a couple of weeks in the Whites hiking after he finished. Since I live there, I invited him to stay with me while he did that and he has. Thank God. I got to keep a real live link back to the trail right in my house! We've done a number of great hikes together and I've enjoyed his company, as we talked trail and hikers non stop for the last 2 weeks. This has given me a chance to gradually let go of the trail, rather than doing it cold turkey. Chaos left today and now I am truly "off the trail".Being home for good is a strange feeling. In some ways, it feels like the trail was all a dream. "How could it have been real?" I ask myself. I have trouble walking from my bed to the bathroom. Yet I can go on a 10 mile, very demanding day hike without much trouble. It's as if my body has become a slave to the notion that I will demand that it get up and carry my spirit 10, 15, or even 20 miles, with or without a backpack, at any given moment. It has become like a good horse. Once I stop, however, my knees ache, my ankles ache, and the bottom of my feet feel numb and sore. I hobble like someone who just jumped out of a second story window onto pavement. "Was it like this on the trail"? I ask myself. The answer is, of course, yes. The difference is that there wasn't much I could do about it then, so I ignored it. Now I can just stop and rest if I wanted to. Somehow I'm not ready to do that yet. Maybe soon. Maybe never.Also, my metabolism is still adjusting. I have kept my weight stable but the real test will come when I stop hiking as much. I have made a successful adaptation back to my regular diet although portioning is still an issue. I'm still putting almost twice as much on my plate as I did before my hike, but Yolanda has gotten me away from fried food, burgers, fattening desserts, and the like. This part of my life will get back on track without any problems.I go to bed around 9:30 whereas before my hike I seldom went to bed before 11:00. I sleep soundly until around 6:00 or 6:30 then get up and go for a hike with Chaos and Yolanda. I won't be doing that as much now that Chaos has left so I'll have to slip back into my old routine which I can't quite remember right now. Being retired, I can shape or reshape that if I wish. Yolanda has been fantastic as she has watched my re-entry with fascination. She has joined me on a couple of hikes which she loves, but we both know that chores around the property await me patiently. There's fallen trees to remove, firewood to cut, split, and stack, landscaping to clean and prepare for our long, cold winters, a vegetable garden to tend and harvest for the season, apples to harvest and process, window screens to take down, clean and put away, outdoor summer furniture to clean and store away, storm doors to put up, perform maintenance that is needed on my gravel driveway, and a final cleaning and storing of all of my backpacking equipment for the winter. I guess it's all starting to come back to me. Is it too late to yo-yo?