morvasaaty/AppalachianTrail-LD-Hikers-Blogs-and-Weather-20-years huggingface dataset:
Date: 2004-02-17
To: ---- Gothtrek 2004 ---- 
Miles today: 0.0

Part of what makes this so exciting is that - as far as I can tell from my research - this is the first time in the history of the trail that some Goth folk are going to do the AT all in vampire costumes. I know right off the bat the things you're gonna say. Like "oh but your makeup will run off when things get sweaty?" or "won't it get tough to eat your tuna helper meals with your fake teeth?". Don't you worry about any breach of professionalism from me and Moxie though. We're hard-frickin-core. No goopy white vampire makeup of ours is going to be running down our (black. of course) patagonia R2's. And no tuna foods will cause our insertable fangs to go astray. Do you know those poor fools who have to dress up like clowns and entertain children at those screaming children fests known as "birthdays"? Johnny the Clown needs to have a makeup which will last all and any of the trials presented to him at the screaming micro-human-fest. He'll need something that outlasts sweat, the flaying suns of any potential windless August day, random colas being tipped on him by errant children, or the burstings of waterballoons which have been launched - as if from a trebuchet - by any local neighbourhood children.There are products to help Johnny the Clown. And me and Moxie are not afraid to use them.Theatrical grease makeup with some value-added polymers (not to mention the SPF add-ins), and we'll be good to go in all our goth glory.The teeth have required a bit more research. We wanted something that we could wear 24/7 with the least amount of discomfort possible. Eventually we learned of discerning dentists who exist out there on the fringes of society who are all-too-happy to take molds of your incisors and from those exact and precise anti-replicas (or replicas-in-reverse I should say, or maybe I should use this moment to summon into creation a new term: "replicas esrever" which is - as I'm sure you've already grasped - quite literally "reverse" in reverse) fashion quite fetching vampiric dental devices. This is much like what they do in Hollywood to ensure that Antoine Actorboy gets some nice and flattering fangs when his character makes the sudden startling transition into one of those feared denizens of the night. Our fangs however are going to be more tough that Hollywood props. We'll want them to be able to deal with a half year of trail mastication afterall.Therefore, we're going with custom made ceramics to achieve our desired end result.It's only a shame that we have to bring our packs at all.Cuz wouldn't it look grand if we were able to ascend any incidental mountain that we come across with our capes flapping triumphantly behind us?
Date: 2004-02-18
To: Morning Coffee
Miles today: 0.0

Coffee's good. And important.Dunno about y'all, but my head's getting a bit pre-occupied these days. At night, when I should be sleeping, I'm instead awake, alert, my mind on maybe ten different things. And there's this feeling in my chest that kinda reminds me of how I felt as a kid on Christmas Eve. Though I'm a little more nerve-wracked.And waking up is easy, even with my sleeping schedule shattered, because my head is immediately alive with thoughts and need-to-do lists and this madcap growing excitement.There'll be a tinge of alarm to it at times. And/or adrenaline. Or joy. Or dread at the sheer amount of stuff which needs to be done. Or combos of all of them at the same time.Mmm. The coffee's good.Happy day, all.PS: To answer your question, yes, entry two is deadly serious um, lacking in some factual, um, quantities.- Whoa
Date: 2004-02-18
To: Oh oh
Miles today: 0.0

There's been a bad development since the last post. The building manager - the one who'd told us that of course we'd be able to break our lease - has been fired. And the new one is tough as nails and doesn't give a flying rat's ass what the previous manager had said. In fact, she just hinted that it was the previous manager's lapses of good business sense which got her booted in the first place. They're in no position to want to honour a verbal agreement with someone who doesn't work here anymore.We have seven months of lease to fill up.Wish us luck, please.
Date: 2004-02-20
To: In one month we'll be out of here
Miles today: 0.0

I'm starting to meet up with friends and go out for dinners with them, hang out, whatever. And instead of it feeling all casual there's this aspect to these meetings of "maybe I won't get some hang-out time like this with them for a long, long time". The four-six month demands of the AT aside, I don't really know what my fate is going to be after the Appalachian Trail. There's something to Los Angeles that has always made it feel like it could only be a transitory for me. There's this mood and energy to the city that is almost feverish. Fairfax at night, you hear the cars, you hear the helicopters. Everyone's busy following a dream. Feverish pursuit of goals. Feverish pursuit of play. Downtown at night, you hear the cars, you hear the planes pulling into their flight paths - an endless queue in the sky.Billions of tons of metal cruising down the freeways, smog obscuring the otherwise clear skies. And people are friendly. And people are a million miles away. And there are so few places with sidewalks with people on them, and everyone seems to get into a homestead mentality - they're cutting out their patch of home and place and being in the urban frontier. And I've always felt like it was a place I could only look at and wonder at instead of truly feeling at home in.Six years into this place, and I must admit - I've mellowed a bit to the city's pace. I've started to see the places of rare and strange beauty. I've come to appreciate the anomalies that more than anything else seem to constitute the heartbeat of this city. The hidden architectural gems. The character that can be evoked within the sameness. The grace in little things - like, say, how you'll suddenly note a graceful bridge silhouetted against the setting sun. The little bursts of culture that show the warmth of human spirit and endeavour. Palm trees. Signs in Spanish. This city is so strange.I know that even for all of the things which are wrong with it, part of me will miss it when I've moved to someplace new...Where? Anchorage? Seattle? Some west coast town with deep rains and the constant smell of green?I think I'll have a whole bunch of months to think about this.Heh.And to not worry about it at all.One last thing about Los Angeles - if it were not for the people I've met here, I certainly would not have stayed as long as I have. I know so many good people here, and I appreciate them so much. And life is full of adventures and possibilities and people must take their own paths. But still. There is something so filled with appreciation and with pain in a goodbye.- Whoa
Date: 2004-02-23
To: sore!
Miles today: 0.0

Yesterday me and Moxie returned to Malibu Creek State Park for some more hiking. We brought our full packs with us. The hiking was great and the views were spectacular. I brought my camera to take pictures, but never took it out on account of the rain, rain, rain, rain! Yes, rain is a rare event in southern California and we were delighted to have such weather tossed at us. Out came the rain jackets and we were making hoots of delight at the empty park and the sheets of heavy rain coming down. The hiking poles were again proving their worth (I'd been dubious about them at first) as we tromped up severely muddly paths with our feet were slip-sliding beneath us. It was an exhilirating hike. We stopped off at some picnic tables and pulled out our brasslite stove and got it going in the full downpour - something we'd had yet to do at that point. It was good to see that steady flame a flickerin'. We got some hot water going and made some instant chai lattes, and it was, of course, wonderful to have the hot liquids go down as the rain was beating down on us. Today though I am sore as heck. And tired. And delighted.And I'm filled with an intuition that having full nights of sleep on the AT is not going to be a problem.
Date: 2004-02-26
To: Rain, Nerves & Killer Robots
Miles today: 0.0

The rain is still falling on LA. This isn't like LA. I think I read somewhere that some years see only 2" of rain come down. This is more like the LA of Blade Runner in which every surreal steet scene is a rainy one. The Bradbury Building incidentally - which in the movie was the home to the genetics tinkerer with all of his eerie living toys - is just a few blocks over from where we live now... This place that we're trying hard to unload so we are free to go on a very long walk.I go between anxiousness and excitement, feeling both at different parts of the day. And the days themselves seem to have slowed down. I constantly find myself thinking that it's the next day of the calendar week. Earlier I thought it was Thursday. Hoping, I guess. Come next weekend. Come weekend after. Come mid March and the start of this journey...The to-do lists are getting smaller all the time.I guess all I need is a bit of patience. And to try really hard not to spontaneously combust in the meantime.
Date: 2004-03-08
To: Glorious Technology
Miles today: 0.0

Can you picture people hiking the AT in these? And wouldn't the light weight extremists be pissed to see some cyborg hiker with a couple hundred pounds of gear go marching easily past them? Tired today. Last weekend we hit up some spots in the Mojave with a whole whack of friends for a "goodbye and goodluck!" camping trip. It was a phenomenal time. Happy/sad. A great full moon (with Jupiter sniffing around its perimeter) presided over the event and the desert bonfire burned long and brightly. Good friends, good times.Moxie had her last day of work on Friday, and we're getting quite excited here.We'd probably be more so if the weekend hadn't worn us out so much.Okay, time to send these words on their way and skedaddle.
Date: 2004-03-21
To: Time keeps on slipping
Miles today: 0.0

Some time has passed since the last entry, but not much has changed. Except anxiousness and nervousness levels are getting even higher. Which I didn't think possible, but there you have it. We still haven't found anyone to take over our place, which is adding to the stress. I'm sure it'll happen, but that doesn't mean it's any less nerve-wracking. We actually decided to start bribing would-be apartment-taker-overs by dropping the price a bit to make it seem more attractive. Oh, there is something new. We decided to start a couple weeks after our original intended start date - somewhere around mid-April. In doing so we're giving up on any possibility of going to Burning Man (a week long art festival that occurs in the Nevada desert during Labor Day weekend) this year. But, I've gone every year since 98, so a break might be nice.... though I kept on thinking how very cool it would be to go to that surreal desert landscape immediately after finishing the trail - it would be our decompression in a way. And so many of our friends would be there in one place, and what a great celebratory thing to have at the end... But, a departure in mid April pretty much guarantees us some viewing of the autumn leaves changing in Maine. And Moxie's never seen this, before. The northeast is incredible! And, hell - after six years in LA, I've got some hankering for some good northeastern vistas. Not to mention weather.Yes, I know. I'll probably be sick of it soon enough. And I say this thinking of, say, the fifth day in a row of hiking in the rain.These are interesting times - these times of transition. I feel myself going through a lot of unexpected emotions as we approach the leaving date. Of course there's anxiety (can I do it?), and nervousness (can *we* do it?), and excitement (I can't wait to be doing it!), and other trail-related brain stuff. But there's all this startling coming-to-terms with my experiences here type of stuff going on too: accessing and appreciating the friendships I've made... Realizations about stuff I've done wrong, or could have done better. Nothing like a change of this magnitude to really make you aware of the workings of your life.It's all good stuff, really. The fodder of unexpected growth.But regardless, I'm at that point where what I want most of all it to simply be on the trail. Soon. So soon.First there is the apartment. The packing up of house. A stop in Arizona. And a train ride across the country.Psyched.- Whoa
Date: 2004-03-22
To: You're going to carry that weight
Miles today: 0.0

There is a Beatles song that keeps occuring to me whenever I put on my fully loaded pack. Here's the snippet of lyrics which always comes to my head:Boy, you're gonna carry that weightCarry that weight for a long time!In my opinion, it's a good song to get in your head when doing pack planning. Another song that pops into my head is the one that goes something like "I would walk five hundred miles, and I would walk five hundred more". Me n Moxie were belting that out to eachother the other day, spicing up the lyrics here and there with references to Maine and blisters.And "The Midnight Train to Georgia" I don't really know. But we're going to get on a train to Georgia, from Union Station, downtown. I think of the upcoming departure everytime I drive by it.Soon. So soon.
Date: 2004-03-29
To: Moxie Dives In
Miles today: 0.0

It's about time I write one, I say to myself as I type out my firsttrail journal entry. As Whoa said to me, noticing my name is on ourjournal yet I've been a silent partner. I've been reading up on somany peoples' successes and tribulations, and though I'm still nearlythree weeks from hitting the trail, I am with you. My heart flips asI follow those hikers on the trail, my stomach twists, I get dizzy.Funny how excitement can manifest itself in physical confusion likethis. We plan to hit the trail April 15 or so now, and it stillseems like a long way off. There are still so many things to dobefore we go, but my pack is sitting there ready as can be. If onlythe rest of the preparations would be so simple!The dreams I have lately are of two flavors. In the first, I seem tofeel the aftershocks of the stress I had been under at work, withmoving, with my just having left the rat-race style of living. Thesecond is the trail dreams. They are placid. They put me in amindset of serenity, and patience, and the mood is so light. New.Fresh.Fresh air! Now, that will really be a treat. Years of L.A. livinghave distanced me from the great outdoors, I can't wait to reconnectwith it. And all those miles of trail and balds and trees... Andvistas like I've never experienced before. And thousands of Kraftdinners! That's just about my favorite food. Thank goodness I'm nogourmet.Let the adventure begin! I'm ready!Yours in seat-shifting anticipation,Moxie
Date: 2004-04-04
To: Last entry from L.A.
Miles today: 0.0

Here we are, the last 24 hours before we hop the midnight train to Georgia. Well, to Scottsdale, AZ at least. We will be getting in a few days of Quality time with my family before we train the rest of the way out east. Oh, and one obligatory stop in New Orleans, where we'll cram in some overnight sightseeing. This last month has been one big goodbye party for us, it seems... our friends are saying, aren't you supposed to go hiking or something? Yes indeed. And I think we are perfectly on time.It is such a cool thing to condense the stuff down, into boxes, then taking those select few items and parsing them down to millions of little plastic bags, then choosing the most important of these little bags and putting them into the pack. And then lifting the pack... I've got to have less little plastic bags! I thought I had the pack weight thing all figured out. Seems I have some more prioritizing to do. A fun train game, I think.Whoa says: Speaking of pack weight... oooh, that new camera. We have such a fabulous camera, if it doesn't break our (or should I say Whoa's) legs and back, we will have some fantastic pictures. Maybe we can just go without sleeping bags, tent, and boots. That should be an even weight trade. Ha.Well, back to the cleaning, packing, and general headless chicken routine-More from the train!--Moxie
Date: 2004-04-06
To: the saguaro cactii are blurred streaks in the trai
Miles today: 0.0

and let me assure you, the streaks are not from us going a cool 80 MPH through the burnt-umber-colored deserts of Arizona. Rather, it's from the dirt and scratches on the glass of our sleeper car. We're sitting at a standstill, and there is a posse of seguaros standing sentry on the hill beside us. It's almost as if they've never seen an amtrak train just sitting in the middle of the desert gong nowhere before.--------Hours Pass. Our heroes are now again in motion... I think Moxie's dad has been waiting for hours for us to make it through whatever snafu was delaying us back there. We'll find out soon if he gave up on us.--------Scottsdale, Arizona - 11 PM. Moxie's dad had not in fact given up on us. He waited four hours longer than he was supposed to & then took us to town & dropped us off. Family visiting and other good stuff. Rare rains in Scottsdale lulling us to sleep now. More soon. -- Whoa
Date: 2004-04-11
To: san antonio, texas
Miles today: 0.0

We're one day's train travel away from Maricopa, AZ where we started off yesterday. It was a little bit grueling - they showed up late, and that seemed to throw the entire day out of whack. We spent a lot of the day pulled over for frieght trains that were going the opposite direction. The mood amongst the passengers started to get a bit rebelious after a while. I think that if there had been any conductors amongst them, cries of mutiny would have been heard.Texas. The green of this place is startling after so much time in the desert. Everything is ripe and flourishing. Trees and vines and bushes seem to crowd around all the rural places we pass, like nona, where the rains were merely an unfulfilled threat in the towering dark clouds, here the rains flow freely from ashen skies.I'm glad that we got good rain gear, because this is a theme that I think is not likely to change anytime soon.Tonight we've a holiday inn room booked in New Orleans,but we're running so late, I don't know if it'll be worth our while... We might just have a couple hour layover instead of the original 11 hours.This is fine by me.Normally, I'd be excited by the prospect of some time in New Orleans, but now, all I have really in my thoughts is the trail.More soon,Whoa
Date: 2004-04-11
To: Patience preparations curtesy of Amtrak
Miles today: 0.0

Two days before we hike! We've been on the train since 6am yesterday, and this leg of the trip doesn't promise to finish anytime soon. The train goes and stops dead in equal parts. Once upon a time, train travel was a nationwide norm, but now the trains are at the mercy of freight trains, and they don't mind a bit if we arrive hours and hours behind schedule. But we did just get to try our first freeze-dried dinner. If fate smiles at us, we'll be in gainesville tomorrow night. And if it doesn't, I guess we could just hop off and start hiking from where we are.-moxie
Date: 2004-04-14
To: Gooches Shelter
Miles today: 17.6

It's hard to do justice to the experiences of the last couple days. My body is sore and the brain is toast.A recap... Instead of indepth examinations of the experiences, I'll just footnote it all. Let's see - surreal cafe and beignes in New Orleans at 4 in the morning - we were killing time, waiting for the 7:30 am train. We passed a statue of Ignatious J Reilly. We passed a car accident on a narrow french quarter street. A van was partially smashed into an antique store. There were weird clientelle in the Cafe du Monde.Let's flash forward to the next night, shall we? Hiker's Hostel. (which kicks ass - I highly endorse this product) Apocalyptic thunder storms that night and heavy pounding rain. And I'm sure many minds in the hostel that night were having thoughts along the lines of "I can't believe I am going to be out in that tomorrow".But we were.Next morning... Deep fogs on Springer Mountain. Little bits of rain. And we marched. And marched. And marched. And it was so strange and cool to finally be on the trail, after all the time spent waiting and preparing. It felt unreal. It felt wonderful.The hiking was good, and fairly easy, but we seemed to hit a threshold at some point in the late afternoon. Yup. We were tapped. Luckily the hawk mountain shelter was nearby. There was room in the shelter for us, but we decided to set up our tent. At 6:30, Moxie was crashed out.It was at that point when the first few snowflakes were wandering down out of the slate grey sky....4 AM today. Time for one of those thrice-damned late night pee breaks. Eigth inches of snow was on the ground. Surreal. Our tent had vast buildups of the white and frosty all over it. We have sleeping bags calibrated to 30 F. I'm sure it was lower than that, but we were okay.Infact, after the snow got deeper, we were actually cozy. The snow insulated us, just like we were in an igloo.I can almost read your thoughts right now. You think we're crazy, don't you? Hehehe.Well, when we finally got out of the snow-covered tent the next morning and felt the shrill arctic winds bear upon us, chances were we asked ourselves the same question.If we didn't then, maybe we did later in the morning. Almost-blizard like conditions at times. Blowing snow. Deep chilliness..Gotta say though, I kinda loved it. The forest was beautiful. And our gear was doing its job in keeping us warm. The hiking was tough, but we continued progressively on to lower elevations. It was a beautiful day.The hiking was easier too.Not without its brutality - there was a lot of up and down, and the majority of our 2000 body parts were making noises of misery at us.Okay. The sun is going down now, so I'm gonna stop this up now.My fingers are chilled sticks. Frozen french fries! So, goodnight, all.Keep well.- Jonathon(Moxie's been crashed out for an hour now... Think I'll join her soon)
Date: 2004-04-15
From: Gooches Shelter

To: Woods Hole Shelter
Miles today: 11.9
Weather: clear sky

We walked long and hard. Our bodies were angry at us. After a long time we made it to the shelter where we wanted to sleep. Hey - what's this about the shelter being .4 miles off the AT? This is nonsense! As we made it up to the watersource / stream for the shelter, this young lady said we'd better stock up there, cuz it was a long way still to the shelter, and we wouldn't want to have to trudge back. And that is how we met LeeAnne. Later on, we were meeting Antonio up by the shelter.Another family was staying there. Travelers from Florida, come out to enjoy the woods. Their young boychild built a fire with oak leaves and said his name was Mud Sock. The father said he'd once seen a buck standing not ten feet away from where we were - so close he coulda jumped over and stabbed it to death with his hunting knife.That night me and Moxie slept under the bear bags. Cuz it was flat. And cuz we were so beat, maybe we were kinda thinking that if a bear would come along and maul us, we wouldn't have to hike no more.