Date: 2010-05-13
From: Missouri

To: Trail Days
Miles today: 0.0

Rather than trying to sort out what happened what day, I'll just make one Trail Days entry. This was by far my best trail days ever. As I did not go in 2001 or 2002, I have never had the true Trail Days experience of a current or last year hiker, where you run into dozens of people you know and the days are just a blur of meetings and exchanges. Thursday was my favorite day, it was still mostly current hikers in the campground. I ran into SO many people.        We got our ticket for the Baptist Church Hiker Feed which was AMAZING- home cooked food galore. We picked up our drums we had shipped, Jasper drummed SO much. Thursday night, some 2009 hikers had a long dogbone shaped fire- way better than a circle I think. Jasper ended up drumming by himself and keeping it going for over an hour with people dancing. The two big drum circles fri and sat night, he was the kingpin holding it all together. Often there are people too drunk or inexperienced to drum properly, keeping the dancers moving can be a challenge. At one point Sat night he left the drum circle for a bit and when he came back, I was a distance away using a privy and I could hear people roar- DIDGERDUDE!!!!!         I don't think we got to bed before 4 am any of the nights. We ended up moving our tent Friday morning as some excessively partying people moved into our little area known as the Pirate's Cove. It started out as a chill, somewhat exclusive, little hard to find enclave, but at some point it became a nexus of partying, and I do want to go to sleep eventually... so the next morning, we moved our tent to camp with the Gooch Crew and just hung out at the Pirate's Cove when we wanted to.         Dirty Bird and Numskull showed up Saturday morning, and we saw Honey and Bear from the Cabin in Maine! I bought a couple stuff sacks from Antigravity Gear. At one point we were walking the half mile back to camp from town and decided to hitch- the car that pulled over had Hoof It in it! We hung out with No Tech a bunch, both of them are up around Pearisburg. We hung out with Slackimus a bunch as well as Kashmir who is also part of HikeStrong.         The hiker parade was awesome, except again, they are not providing year banners- just one big mass of hiker chaos. Didge played harmonica with a guy before the parade. Texas Jack came up to him and gave him kudos and basically told him he'd been wrong about him when he was giving him flak a couple days ago. My man's got skills.         But he was robbed in the talent show. He went second or third and during his didgeridoo performance they decided to rearrange the speakers so we couldn't even see him on stage. There were a quite a few people who frankly sucked and were painful to listen to. The winner was a little girl who sang "Horse with no Name"- she was okay, has some talent, but she only won cause she was cute and young. Sorry little girl if you read this, but you had no business being up there.         Our friend Crusher played "O Canada" on the nose flute- it was totally awesome! The judges are morons, he deserved an honorable mention at least. We got to hang out a lot with Dirty Bird and Numskull, our hiker friends from home, we sent some extra gear with her, as we are going to ride home to MO with her in a couple weeks. She is visiting Numskull in SC for a month. We camped with them Sunday night up at the trailhead where we are getting back on, it rained all day Sunday, that kind of sucked. Finally Monday morning we started hiking again after 5 days off.