Date: 2017-05-18
From: Woods Hole

To: Perisburg
Miles today: 10.6
Weather: light rain

Woods Hole has their guests help out with some chores around the hostel and my job for the morning was to collect the dirty towels from the shower area and bring them to the laundry. DoubleBarrel (one of the people doing work-for-stay) ended up doing my job for me, which freed me of my responsibility for the morning, which was nice. When they serve the morning coffee they also put out a laundry basket of towels with a sign "If you're bored, fold me!" for hikers to help them in their downtime. Since my job had been done for me, I decided I was bored.Breakfast this morning rivaled dinner... farm eggs and cheese, farm sausage, peach cobbler, oranges, fresh bread, homemade butter, apple butter, strawberry butter, and orange juice. And enough for seconds. My stomach has never been so ready for a day of hiking.Today was also my first day of hiking in my new shoes! After snapping some pictures of the carnage I had wrought on the old pair I sent them off to their final resting place and slipped into the new ones. These are half a size bigger and fit better for my growing feet and are not falling apart, both great advantages. As soon as we started hiking I could feel the difference, these shoes had far more padding and cushioning than then old pair which made the rocky sections much more enjoyable. It'll take a couple days to fully break them in, but we have a nice easy 12mi day today and then 3 days of Trail Days before we put any serious miles on them.The top of a ridge in a national forest with spotty cell service is not the ideal place to arrange transportation or lodging, but that's what had to happen. We needed a way to get to Damascus from Perisburg today, a way to get Lookout and I back to the trail after the weekend, a way to get Classy to her new city by Sunday afternoon, and a place to sleep for the weekend. It's not complicated to get to trail days... everyone in the hiker community knows about it and there are hundreds of cars heading there that are happy to pick up a few hikers along the way, but Classy's time constraints and our desire to hang with her for as long as possible meant our only option was to rent a car for the weekend. Which meant we needed a shuttle to a town that had a car rental place that still had cars (Perisburg Enterprise had rented all their cars). Long story short, after convening at a overlook with signal and after much googling and many phone calls we had a car reservation in Blacksburg, VA, a shuttle reservation to get us there, and had decided that sleeping in tent city was the best lodging option because all the hotels, hostels, bed and breakfasts, and cabins anywhere near Damascus were full and the city wasn't allowing tenting at private residences.We booked it down the last few miles into Perisburg, found Don (our shuttle driver) waiting at the trailhead for us, and headed off to get our car. A 35min drive through the scenic mountains of Virgina and we arrived. The Enterprise smelled nice inside and had AC, both much appreciated. We got the car,  a Jeep Compass because they were out of smaller cars, and headed over to Panera for lunch. A sandwich and a smoothie later we headed over to Walmart to get some weekend supplies and then were on our way (back) to Damascus.The drive down was very pretty... It's an interesting perspective to be in a car after having walked for so long. It's easy to see a lot with a car because of how fast it moves, but it's also hard to see, to really see and appreciate, anything while moving that fast. We crossed over the AT on I-81 in Atkins on our way down and the signage which describes the amenities on each exit claimed there was no camping available there... blatantly false.Just a heads up, I'm not intending to post journals about our time at trail days... This is a journal about my hike of the AT and we're not doing any hiking this weekend! I may do a couple of shorter entires if anything interesting happens, but otherwise I'll be back on the trail Sunday!