Date: 2004-03-02
From: Springer Mountain

To: Stover Creek Shelter
Miles today: 2.5
Weather: light rain

"Grace" has emailed her first entry from the trail to me (her mom). I tried to enter it and made a mess of it....here's the revised..hoping it works:so it's supposedly 59*, i'm in my sleeping bag, in the shelter, in the rain, and i smell pretty bad. brian, kat, mike and i are the only ones here so far, not counting some non-verbal old guy who chose to pitch his tent down by the water source. whatever. we're all cooking food from inside the shelter, maybe because we haven't yet grow to understand the threat of bears first hand. maybe once we get a few fingers bitten of we'll cook our noodles at a distance, but for now, screw the bears i wanna stay dry. the hike today was extremely easy and flat for the most part, since brian and i are pansies and skipped the approach. the only reason we stopped so soon was the rain. ridiculous amounts of precip and low cloud cover just after we left the summit and headed back north. even the rain wouldn't have been so bad if i had had a big enough pack cover. oh, and if brian had had a rain jacket which was actually waterproof. oh well. re-gear at neels gap.last thursday was the day i started the great southern migration. wednesday night i threw up. a lot. and i really didn't sleep. at all. so that wasn't fun, and neither was thursday morning. i still had a bad case of that lepidopterous nausea you hear so much about. besides that, i was a cranky girl for not getting my beauty sleep. did mommy appreciate my cranky butt? no. she got all cranky herself. then grammie got all cranky. so we were all pretty cranky til we got to brian's place in reading, pa. brian came out, all decked in '80s nols issue pants. i swear his trail name's gonna be patches before long. none of this lawnmower man business. we said hello and goodbye to his granny, packed the tastykakes in the front seat, and busted outta pa. brian and i bickered about music and tested each other's verbal tolerance until reaching my uncle's house in winchester, va, stopping once just out of west virginia to pee at a mcdonalds. i include this pitstop as an excuse to tell you a!bout one of the best real life jerry springer moments i've witnessed this year. picture a green-skinned, yellow-haired, bulb-bellied young mother, brat clad and screaming in everybody's favorite awful drawl towards the counter across a well-marked wet floor: "i FELL with my BABY!" the hoe fell with her baby on the floor in mcdonalds, and even though the danger was obviously marked by yellow cone thingies, she chose to pull out the stops and scream at the poor teenager behind the counter. laugh f'ing riot.anyway. we spent two nights at my uncle's visiting with my mom's crazy family, then went on to greensboro, nc for a night to visit with my dad's crazy family. grizzly adam was supposed to meet us for barbecue, but he forgot my pocketmail address and i forgot his phone number. after greensboro, it was atlanta for two restless nights. the day between was spent slacking and trying to find an outfitter which turned out to be the best of my present experience. great selection of sweat sucking shirts and non dorky hiking pants. the girl behind the counter even went to the trouble of photocopying road maps in an attept to better explain our parade route to the summit. maybe someday i'll remember the name of the place, but until then, i'll just have to let you know that the kids there hold the title of having the first indoor climbing wall in atlanta.this morning we left the hotel around 6:30 after my hydration bag leaked all over my gear. dahlonega around 7:30, followed by a fruitless two hour search for ross's hostel. he won't be there til tomorrow, so i told him i'd leave some custom minidiscs for his arrival. 7694 hwy 19 or something, but no signs to be had. the police department hadn't even heard of the place. we finally gave in to the welcome center. welcome center, indeed. the place was manned by a horrid woman or sixty or so, who most likely would have smelled of revlon and aquanet if i had ventured in for a closer whiff. not only had she no idea about the hostel, but she flatly refused to tell us how to get to nimblewell gap. too dangerous, she said. too dangerous my ass, lady. she went on to tell us that there are black bears in the woods, that we should make sure we have the right shoes, and that we should keep journals. not about the bad parts, though. only the good parts. we wouldn't want to remember the bad! parts. she gave us a little xeroxed brochure on this whole appalachian trail thing. turns out people hike on it. crazy. what a complete moron. i seriously wanted to punch things. never in my life have i been so deterred by a welcome center. from this point on, i refuse to solicit welcoming from municipalities of any kind. so anyway, we hit the mud around 1:30 and left all the dumb hoes far behind. so happy. and that brings us back to doe, dow, dough, doh...