Date: 2014-06-16
From: Gravel Springs Hut

To: Front Royal, VA
Miles today: 13.4

Warning. This entry has movie spoiler alerts.Slept so-so with mice running around outside my tent. Voodoo slept worse in the shelter. An 8 year old out for the night with his dad (or grandpa?) convinced her the shelter was a good idea. The shelter was near full but there was room next to the kid. By the time I woke up this morning, most of the people in the shelter were gone and Voodoo filled me in about mice pooping on her, the snicker bar wrappers fiasco, and how the kid may potentially be possessed. He was making noises in his sleep like "hungghhhherrygahh!" And suddenly sitting up to yell "EVIIIIIL!" only to lay back down like nothing happen then continue convulsing and making strange exorcism noises. I saw the mice poop too. That was a lot of mice poop which she didn't know at the time. It must have gotten all over her... So there's that. Bright side is that today means we're hiking to town! We hit the trail and started breezing through the miles but inevitably started talking food at some point. We decided salad was our must have food and discussed in excessive detail how we are going to make them. Yet, when we eventually got to town we found ourselves shoving Crackdonalds into our mouths since McDonalds was so close and convenient. We never did get a salad.... Anyways when we popped out of the woods to the road crossing, we ran into our friends - The Mountain Slothes. We couldn't believe it, they were yellow blazing to Harper's Ferry but here they were with more amazing travel stories to share with us. They filled us in and introduced us to Molasses, a former thru hiker who was basically being an awesome human being and showing them a great time and full hospitality. We filled them in about the Shenandoahs and they told us their crazy story with Molasses as their hero/awesome spirit animal. We basically settled that he has to come with us to Machu Picchu when we all go together in the near future. We eventually went separate ways and Molasses gave Voodoo and I a sweet ride to Front Royal, VA. From there we procured a hotel room where we decided to spoil ourselves since we both could use some real sleep to catch up on. Before that though, we grabbed the Crackdonalds meal then hit the grocery store to grab beer to sneak into the movie theater later. Then it was time for a shower... Voodoo was first and she came out saying, "uggggghhh, you've got to go!" Like it was the greatest theme park ride that just came into existence. She was right. I don't know why this shower in particular was above all the rest. It was the best shower I've ever had. Maybe the past 10 days have been more difficult than I realized and this shower was like therapy time. Some reason this one was extra special. Plus we had shower beers! Don't you know how amazing shower beers are even without the whole backpacking thing? I was so happy about finding Flying Dog beers at the store. The Flying Dog Raging Bitch is one of my favorite beers and I brought that bitch in the shower with me. All nicely cleaned up with good brew, we dove right into the HBO channel and than reality tv. We made fun of basically everything that came on. But Voodoo needed a power nap after sleeping next to a possessed child last night and I needed to fix my phone. I never updated the IOS for my iPhone and that resulted in me needing to restore it or else I couldn't get cell service for some reason. Instead of going into a long boring explanation of the whole ordeal, let's just say I basically fiddled with my iPhone for a couple hours before giving up and accepting the fact I need a computer with iTunes on it to restore the thing. Voodoo woke up at this time and we both wanted to go to the movie theater. It has been forever since either one of us has been. Yet we got sucked into two of Voodoo's favorite shows - Turtle Team and Finding Bigfoot. I felt like we hit the next level of retardation watching and making fun of it. We had to get away from the tv. Unfortunately the movie theater only shows 3 different movies. One was How to Train Your Dragon 2 which we knew nothing about, the second was Malificent which we knew even less about, and the third was some romance movie with two people kissing on the poster. No thanks.We went with Malificent but once we paid for the movie, the girl behind the counter tells us "Sorry but you can't take bags inside."Shit.I turned to Voodoo saying, "well, do you think it'll be cold in there?" *hint hint, nudge nudge*(I wrapped our beers in our fleeces for safe keeping and to preserve the coolness). I pulled out my fleece bundled around 5 beers before handing over my empty bag and it couldn't have been more obvious. Voodoo grabbed a couple of her own before she handed over her bag. From there we boldly proceeded into the theater carrying our fleeces like babies. Once we stepped into the dark room, a joke I had made while walking to the place just 20 minutes ago basically became a realistic problem. I joked about how one of us is going to accidentally tip a bottle over and it'll make the loudest cluh-clunking noise you can ever fathom and continue to roll down the cement towards the front with the inglorious ting-a-linging sound on repeat times 100 until it finally stops after an eternity of awkwardness. Well this movie theater was the smallest I have ever seen in my life and it was full of people. There were like 8 rows with maybe 10 seats each. SHIT.Obviously we were both having regrets and wished to have stayed in our hotel being retarded instead of pretending to be normal in public. Well we were committed so we crept to some available seats cradling our sacred fleece babies that we obviously didn't need to stay warm. We worried that the lights would stay on throughout the entire movie too, not that it would make a difference because whatever we raised to our faces, it would literally block the view of the people behind us. One step at a time... We may be stuck watching a crappy movie without being able to drink but dammit we were going to try. We snickered as people behind us tried to stealthily crack open a soda during loud parts of previews. We were able to open our glass bottles more quietly but between the two of us, the sound was painfully loud. So we prolonged it like tss... sssssss......... sss........ssssss...sssssskk. Once we did get our bottle caps off which took approximately 2 whole previews, we sat there through the rest of the previews not knowing what to do next. We were waiting for an opportunity but it was obviously never coming. I suddenly feared my beer was going to get warm. That motivated me to spring to action - get water cups! I carefully placed my beer under the seat with tedious effort not to bring my joke to light and told Voodoo I had an idea. She gave me a look that basically said thank god, please hurry. Next thing you know the movie has started and we have small cups of water that suspiciously never emptied. But the lights turned off and the beginning of the movie was spectacularly CGI'd and... What the hell? It looks like a children's movie with fairies, gnomes, disneyish woodland anthropomorphic woodland critters, sparkles, and the works. Voodoo turned to me and said "I'm so sorry, I apologize in advance." I laughed. All was good and we had bottomless cups of water to drink. We couldn't stop snickering at the ridiculously cheesy Disney romance stuff because we're children that know better than most children. The main fairy girl suddenly becomes Angelina Jolie, some war starts, things get interesting, and we got drunk. Raging Bitches are 8.3% alcohol and Voodoo had 8 Point IPAs from Devils Backbone. I couldn't stop making Team Turtle and Finding Bigfoot references so there were several times I had to try really hard to stifle a laugh that resulted in me banging my head against the chair in front of me when I hunched over to hide. But the best part of the movie was when the princess goes into a coma and they're trying to wake her up. The guy you're supposed to think wakes her up with a true love kiss fails so I thought it was going to be the crow human dude. Voodoo turned and joked "lesbihonest" as Angelina Jolie walked up to the bed. That made me laugh out loud but then Angelina Jolie actually kisses the princess and wakes her up out of the coma. I DIED and couldn't keep it together. I may have missed the last 15 minutes of the movie laughing so hard. I had to get up and laugh outside about it with the girl behind the counter watching me. It was ridiculously obvious at that point what we were up to and I'm sure everyone in the theater knew. They were basically laughing at us laughing at the movie. So that was that. What a nice break from the trail. But we weren't totally drunk yet. We were still able to feign sobriety by just shutting up and walking straight out of the theater at the end. We walked straight to the sports bar.