Date: 2009-05-17
From: Damascus, VA

To: Davis Path Campsite
Miles today: 2.7
Weather: overcast clouds

Mileage-wise, we didn't really accomplish much today, but we did successfully break free of the gravitational pull of Damascus, and that's an important thing.I skipped a few days worth of entries during Trail Days, but rather than try to go back and fill them in I'm just going to hit the highlights here, in no particular chronological order. The what happened on what day isn't all that important anyway, plus it's a bit fuzzy in hindsight.-and no, it's not fuzzy because I'm hungover. I don't think I drank more than 5 or 6 beers over the whole 3 days. :PTrail Days Highlights:-I need to give a big thanks to Chris from Big Agnes. I woke up atop a deflated pad again on Friday morning after my third attempt at patching my pinhole leaks. So I rolled it up and brought to the Big Agnes booth and dropped it off for them to patch professionally. Chris did a much more thorough job gooping up the leaking area than I did, and when I stopped back in the afternoon to pick it up he rewater- tested it to verify that it was fixed. But it was still leaking! Under pressure, and with the deep tub of water to submerge it in, you could see that it was actually leaking from a diffuse patch of fabric near the valve instead of a series of pinholes as I had thought. Chris theorized that it may be caused by a delamination of the material at that flex point. Rather than trying to do a great big patch over the whole area he just went in the back and got me a brand new pad. Woohoo! Problem solved.-Leki's free trekking pole service tent also got my poles back in tiptop shape. When I dropped them off I let them know that I had a stubborn locking mechanism on one of them, and they said that they would do an internal cleaning on them to fix that. Upon pickup I found out that not only did they clean the poles inside & out, but they also completely replaced all four of the locking mechanisms, both of the worn down tips, and the while lower section of the left pole after they discovered a hairline crack in it during cleaning. All for free, of course. You gotta love companies that stand by their stuff -Pickle and I entered every gear giveaway and raffle we could find but neither of us won a damn thing.-Skunk bought himself a hammock and sent his tent home. I nearly did the same after seeing some of the deals that they were giving to hikers, but decided not to. Laying in one for a few minutes is very comfortable, and I'm sure I could nap the afternoon away in one, but I'm not 100% sure I could sleep all night in it. I always seem to end up spending some time sleeping on my stomach and even with the almost flat sleeping position in these new ones that's still something you really can't do. At some point I think I'll get Skunk to let me try his out overnight.-Speaking of Skunk Ape, we got to meet some of his family today. His mother, sister, and two of his nieces were up from Florida to see his little brother before his shipping off to afganistan, and they were able to swing by Damascus for a little visit and to give us a ride back to the trail.-got to see a bunch more of our fellow '09er's. And I got totally soaked walking in the parade. I will try to post the pictures of that as soon as I can.-other than that...I ate too much town food, walked around too much in my crocs and made my feet sore, and was generally a lazy bum for 4 days.And now I'm paying for it. I think parts of my body had decided that we must be done hiking, and now they are not happy about being back on the trail. Today felt like Georgia all over again.Supposed to be sunny tomorrow. Yay!