Date: 2012-05-31
From: Standing Bear Farm

To: Day 16
Miles today: 0.0

What a day. We woke up feeling great after a warm shower, a hot meal, and a blazing campfire last night at Standing Bear. And my only plans for the day were to find my way to Asheville, NC and score some weed. Evan decided to hike on and go easy on his budget but Jude, always ready for a side-adventure came with me because he'd never been to Asheville before. Curtis, the owner of Standing Bear, was running into town this morning so he offered to give us a lift up to a more active interstate on-ramp by some rafting shops. After about an hour of standing in the heat outside of a rafting shop we finally got a hitch from a kind old man all the way to the highway leading into town. Not wanting to stand around waiting for another hitch, we decided to just hike the 3 miles into town. Just as we hit the outskirts of the city we noticed a little head shop on the side of the highway so we decided to pop in and buy some tobacco and rolling papers. Inside, we were approached by a guy in a nice business suit and gelled-back hair who was just entirely too interested in us. Apparently he saw us walking into the store while he was driving down the highway and pulled over to come say hi. We played our cards right and got the guy to offer to shuttle us the rest of the way into downtown. The guy actually turned out to be really cool; he's an ex-hippie lawyer with a young family who was just trying to score some weed from some friendly local stoners. It's unfortunate that we couldn't help him out.    It felt great to be back in the heart of downtown Asheville again. The energy is this town is just so vibrant and alive. So much more comfortable than Gatlinburg, or just about any other town I've hit so far. I have a buddy who lives here named Hakuna Matata. Reason why he has a trail-name is because he did a northbound thru-hike of the AT last year. We never saw each other though because I was a couple weeks north of him when I started in Harpers and a couple weeks south of him when I got back from Camp and All Good. Hakuna Matata has since moved here to Asheville and sunk his roots into the traveler/hiker/outdoorsman scene here, but he was working until the early evening today so Jude and I would have to wait to meet up with him and his homies. There was no deliberation between Jude and myself, we both knew exactly what were were going to do with the afternoon. So we marched directly to my favorite place in all of downtown Asheville, The Bier Garden, and got to drinking.   The Bier garden is a relatively up-scale fine restaurant and German-themed bar, but there's no dress code and they also let you bring in dogs and filthy stinky hiker trash like Jude and myself. After a couple pints, Jude and I are enthralled in some sort of animated higher-minded intellectual discussion. After a few more, we've captivated the entire table of women sitting next to us with our story. But this was no ordinary table of women, it consisted of about half a dozen members of a tennis league for women over 50 who are in town to go to a match this weekend. And we had these women wrapped around our fingers. "Yes, I live in the woods. Yes, I walked here from Georgia. Yes, I'm having the time of my life and learning new things about myself every day." We pretty much felt like celebrities. Not only did the women pick up our bar tab, but they also bought us food and offered to get us a hotel room for the night. Trail magic is strong even you're nowhere near the trail! We turned down their offer to put us up in a room and probably bang us for the rest of the night and, instead, walked to another bar to meet my up with Hakuna Matata.    He scooped us up, bought a bunch of beer, and took us back to his new house that he just moved into this week. After showers and bowls, the heavy drinking started again. Me and Hakuna Matata haven't seen each other since before we started hiking last year so we had a lot of catching up to do. As the night got rowdier more and more of his friends kept showing up, almost all of whom have hiked the trail within the past 2 or 3 years. It was a straight up thru-hiker party for the ages. Just how I like it. Everyone was so amped to meet some guys currently hiking. You could just see the spark in everyone's eyes and feel the passion for the outdoors in their voices. Asheville is a very transient town attracting world-class adventurers, explorers, travelers, and dead-beats. Everyone here gets it and gets each other it seems. Communities like this are the quintessential definition of "a diamond in the ruff." I had the most fun I've had in a while exchanging stories and hearing other peoples accounts of 2,200 miles worth of American wilderness. Gosh I'm just overflowing with joy right now.