Date: 2017-10-04
From: Partnership shelter

To: Hurricane Mountain shelter
Miles today: 19.1
Weather: clear sky

There's a cost that comes from having as many metaphorical balls up in the air as I did yesterday, when I was coming to terms with my friend in New Zealand going into palliative care and getting in touch with my old newspaper there to prepare his obituary, while also trying to arrange to meet up with Three Gallon, Cucumber Boy and Sacha to hike in the Grayson Highlands -- and trying to do all this with crappy AT&T connectivity. That cost emerged midway through today when I realised I was a day out of sync with Three Gallon and Cucumber boy, thinking I was meeting them tomorrow when they actually expected to meet the day after.I'd headed off ahead of the rest of Team KRT because I thought I'd need to do 23 miles today -- doable, but a long day -- to meet Three Gallon and co at the shelter they were aiming to reach. But around midday I got a message from them saying I was a day ahead of the schedule we'd discussed. The trouble was that I only had a day and a half of food and was relying on them for my next resupply. This was further compounded by not being sure if my reply reached them. My phone claimed to have service and the message status was listed by it as "sending", but no particular indication that it had actually been sent. I figured I'd let future me worry about that.I explained this food dilemma to Three Goldilocks and the Bear when I met them at Trimpi shelter and Cricket was kind enough to lend me the spare meal she'd been carrying, possibly for quite a while. Together with some fudge and cookies I'd cadged from Sriracha's supply from his granny -- as I was leaving Partnership shelter, he said: "It's dangerous to go alone. Take this." -- I figured I'd be OK. Trimpi shelter was another example of the enticing shelters in the South. It was an attractive stone-walled structure with a fireplace in the far wall that would be perfect on a wet spring day. Even on a warm fall day, it was still a nice place to spend a little time.Water was flowing from a piped spring near the shelter in just enough quantity to make it viable, which was important because it took a while to reach the next source. It was in the middle of this dry stretch that the rest of Team KRT was aiming to reach tonight.I thought about pushing on to Old Orchard shelter, where Three Gallon and co were going to reach tomorrow, but in the absence of any word from them, I opted instead for an easier day and stopped four miles short at Hurricane Ridge shelter.Three Goldilocks and the Bear were present, as was a young hiker called Tea Time, who I'd met just before McAfee Knob. He was an 18-year-old who'd started on the AT as a whim after hitchhiking the Blue Ridge Parkway and had been switching between hiking and yellow blazing his way around, including hitching from Partnership shelter to here via the road. He was an interesting guy but also very young and had virtually no money. He slept beside the fire in a US Red Cross blanket to augment a very thin sleeping bag.But it was still a convivial night of conversation around the fire. And I have enough food to meet my friends tomorrow.Life is good.AT fact of the day: One of the guys who was at Partnership shelter was a flip-flopper who had also yellow-blazed from there but wasn't at this shelter tonight. He had spoke to me wondering why some groups, such as the Goldilocks, seemed to be unfriendly to him. Maybe he couldn't remember last night when, having drunk rather more communal beers than he paid for, he'd racked out next to the Goldilocks women and went on to recount, in loud voice and vivid detail, all the women he'd slept with since starting the trail. Maybe that was it? I guess we'll never know...