Date: 2014-06-03
To: Leaving Waynesboro
Miles today: 500.0

Greetings once again from the trail! It has been way too long since my last post, over 400 miles in fact! I have walked through the home states of both of my parents (dad's from GA, mom from NC). I am now well over half way through my own home state of Virginia, which is home to almost 550 miles (about 1/4) of the trail, easily more than any other state. It is strange thinking back on the countless car rides to visit family growing up, with me and Sarah in the back doing the "Are we there yet ?" routine, and realize that I have now more or less made those trips on foot. I'm betting those car rides feel much shorter in the future. Anyways, plenty has happened since Beauty Spot. A lot of it seems like a blur, but I will try to share some of the highlights.The week following the epic night on Beauty Spot, which you might recall was my first night on top of a bald and my first cowboy camp, threw me a few more trail firsts. I will detail some of those in my next entry. For now, a long awaited second experience, the subject of this journal¢¦As a kid, I went to summer camp in the mountains of North Carolina. It was a pretty outdoorsy camp, with sessions focused around rock climbing, whitewater rafting, caving, and certainly hiking. This is where I first spent any extended time on the AT and probably where my thru hiking goal first took root. Anyways, one of my most vivid memories from our excursions on the trail was spending the night in a red barn. I wasn't sure why a big red barn was in the middle of our hiking trail or, otherwise, what we were doing in the middle of some guy's farm. However, our counselors told us it was our shelter for the night, so I figured they had something worked out with Old McDonald. Either way, having a barn materialize out of the woods was pretty cool, and I wasn't complaining about not having to set up a tent at the end of a long day of hiking. That night, we had a blast singing songs around the fire, staying up too late, getting into shenanigans, and onto the counselors' nerves.Years later, while doing research in prep for my thru hike, I found out that there are, in fact, hundreds of shelters on the AT for public use. This led to the realization that my magical red barn from summer camp was just another one of these shelters, and I began looking forward to spending another night there. Once I started the trail, however, and saw what shelters on the AT were like (3-sided huts barely big enough to stand up in, mostly), I began to think that maybe we had been on a different trail that summer, or that maybe we really had wandered on to someone's farm. Regardless, in the back of my head, I was on the lookout for my red barn. Two days after Beauty Spot, I was hiking a big day, pushing for Doll Flats and the TN-NC border where you stop crisscrossing and leave NC behind for good. I had already stopped for lunch and still had a long way to go, so I zoomed right by Overmountain Shelter instead of hiking almost a half mile off-trail to stop for a snack. As I was beginning to climb Little Hump Mountain, I heard thunder and, turning around, saw a huge, black thunderhead rolling right towards me. Right below the cloud, in a clearing tucked in the valley I had just left, I saw my barn! It was fate! I had no choice but to take cover as opposed to walking over bald Hump Mountain in a lightning storm, and the closest cover was my barn. I turned on my heels and literally ran downhill, making it to Overmountain Shelter just as it started raining buckets. The atmosphere at the barn on my second stay was very similar to my first. Either because of the rain or because it is such a unique, iconic shelter, there were 25-30 of us there that night. This was easily the biggest group I had seen since Georgia, except maybe at the Fontana "Hilton," a large shelter with a bath house near the entry to the Smokies. Like years earlier, there were plenty of shenanigans and music, but no counselors, and no one stayed up later than hiker midnight (sunset). This definitely wasn't the first time on the trail I've gotten the impression that I'm at summer camp for big kids, but at the barn it was accompanied by an overwhelming sense of deja vu and a trip down memory lane. The trail continues to provide and surprise.