Date: 2003-04-20
From: Vandeventer shelter

To: TN 91
Miles today: 11.1

Happy Easter! Yes, we don't forget these things on the Trail. I ate one of eArThworm's Snicker eggs in a sunrise celebration, and walked a ridge trail lined with violet-studded Easter grass.Louisa also presented me with a little cellophane Easter bag, full of chocolate eggs and a bottle of the anti-inflammatory ketoprofen - breakfast of champions! Now there's something the Easter bunny never thought of...For Easter breakfast, I announced my choice bacon, eggs and cinnamon-raisin bagels. Yeah, right. But it was true. I pulled out the toasted bagel chips, Oscar Meyer Real Crumbled Bacon and an egg I had hard-boiled yesterday.Ahhh, just like downtown.Well, most of the the young 'uns were still snoring away in the shelter when I arose. No moonlight night hike due to the fog that obscured the meteor shower that was obscured by the near-full moon. Only Goldberry and Lemming left in the dark of the night.This Easter Sunday is slightly overcast. The sun peeks through from time to time, but it looks like it might rain by the afternoon. We scuttle along the ridgeline.We are walking through the Iron Mountains. A decent ore was discovered here and, combined with the coal railroaded in from West Virginia, served to make Johnson City, TN the steel capitol of the US. But the reason you never cheer for the Johnson City Steelers is because a very high grade of iron ore was then discovered in Michigan; it was cheaper to ship it across the Great Lakes to Ohio, down rivers and canals to Pittsburgh. Now Pittsburgh is the steel capitol of the nation.The temperatures grow hotter but the Trail does grow sweeter. Chandler's cold is not improving via the hauling-great-weights-uphill therapy, and his demise is almost certain.Louisa, however, is proving rather harder to kill. She harbors AT thru-hike dreams of her own. Ten years, she says. She's already backpacked the 100-mile-wilderness by herself. You go girl. We leapfrog all day with Wicked Wizard, Snappy and Puff-Puff, the young Brit Emii, Chameleon, Aurelius, Dave from Nova Scotia and others.My river friends were getting a healthy taste of the thru-hiking experience. But we three agree it's far better to let the boat carry one's supplies, versus one's back, feet and legs.Trail angeling is also part of the experience, and who should be waiting at the TN 91 trailhead but Dave Thomas and his red truck. Dave is a friend of my dear hometown support person, Carolyn Wind. Carolyn's friends range from gurus to Hell's Angels, so who knows what Dave will be like?But any friend of Carolyn's is a friend of mine, especially if he whisks us off for Mexican food and margaritas, which he does. Dave turns out to be a perfectly normal father of three teenaged sons, and they all live on a lake. How cool is that?   Before that, I shower and make friends with Dave's excellent alarm system, Milo the dachshund. Guard Dog Milo first peed on the linoleum and then yapped at us incessantly for about an hour, until I cuddled him in my lap and demonstrated the egregious error of his ways. Then he butted my hand for ear scratches the rest of the night. Yes, call me ... The Weiner Dog Whisperer.Dave has cable movies! Movies, my weakness. So, we four stay up far too late watching a good Robert Redford flick "The Last Castle" and the wonderful Mel Gibson movie "What Women Want."Louisa and Chandler crawl onto the couches in tortured positions and fall dead asleep. I lay my bag on the floor, and listen to the sound of the spring peepers out on the lake.Rain is predicted for tomorrow.