Date: 2005-05-07
From: Damascus, Virginia

To: View Entry
Miles today: 0.0

I got up thinking I was getting up early, but when I walked out of the hostel, and out on Main Street, there were people everywhere. Hundreds of people. The town, this day, is having a yard sale, town wide. All on Main Street, people have set up tables and are putting out their used gear from their garages and closets. It was a bustling town. It got me a little confused.   I was starting to think that I had overslept; that I had slept late in a big way. So I looked through some of the stuff walking down to Dairy King, which is where I planned to have breakfast.   I sat down and had a huge, big breakfast.People are milling everywhere. I finished my breakfast and went and asked one of the other people who were sitting there eating breakfast, who had a watch, what time it was. He told me 7:00, so very obviously it was very early still. The town today had very much of a festival atmosphere. The streets were packed with people. The cars were only driving through at five miles an hour. The kids were everywhere. One church group had a tent set up where they were cooking hamburgers, hot dogs, and had potato chips and Cokes for very reasonable prices. I stopped right away and got two hamburgers. Walking down one side of the street and later when I walked back down past it I got two more hamburgers. I was definitely getting the protein count up. I got back to the hostel at 8:30 in the morning, and spent the rest of the morning very busy. I had three mail drops that I had to sort and organize to determine what I was taking with me in terms of food; what I was sending home; and what I was bumping ahead to Pearisburg, Virginia. I also had a new pair of 806 New Balance shoes in this mail drop which I switch every three hundred miles.   I stopped at the outfitters and picked up a tube of Free Sole urethane glue. I completely resealed the shoes because I noticed the last pair, the seams were leaking at times when I was walking through wet grass my feet were still getting a little damp. Also, because I had changed my backpack, I had to spend quite a bit of time with the new backpack switching some stuff over from the old one to the new one. I tried to figure out where everything was going to fit. It¢s always a major traumatic incident when you change backpacks in midstream. I know I¢m going to be going through some growing pains with this one.I had been previously been carrying a fanny pack as well and had decided to send that home as well because this has two little side pockets at the belt, but not enough room to fit everything that I had been carrying in my fanny pack before. For a while I am going to be kind of lost with this.It got to be an unconscious thing with my fanny pack knowing which pocket to reach into to get my camera or to get some beef jerky or to get my radio and now I have to scrounge around and try to figure out where I put stuff.Last night I did not sleep well at all. My knee was killing me. If I sleep on my side now, which is my normal sleeping posture, I wake up and my right knee is in severe pain at the point where I almost have to scream out when I go to straighten it out. I have to try to sleep on my back with my legs completely straight out when that happens. Sleeping on my back is not normal for me; it is very uncomfortable. I also have a tendency to snore, which obviously I did last night, because two of the hikers that stayed in the room that I was in had decided to run off in the middle of the night and stay in another room. That also happens if I drink a lot, which I am pretty sure that I did. In fact, Sam and Origami were telling me that I had a conversation going on last night. I was talking in my sleep. Not just disconnected words, but an entire clear conversation. Something having to do with Main Street, which I thought was a little disturbing and funny at the same time. They all joked about it. The other two hikers that I had run off found more humor in it than I did as well. What else happened today? I just basically ran around town looking through all the yard sales. I didn¢t want to buy anything because I didn¢t want to carry it. It was still fun. Ate a lot. Stopped a couple of different times and ate different things. I went to the new Mexican burrito place that¢s in the place where the Side Track Caf© used to be. It¢s now a Mexican caf©. I had one of their huge burritos. While I was sitting there, Spicy Thai walked in and told me that he had picked up his friends. They had rented a house just on the outskirt of town, and to walk over there. There were cooking that day, later as well. Beantown, myself, and Jersey Fresh went over there. They did indeed have like fifteen pounds of hamburgers, bag of fifty hot dogs. They had fried eggs cooking; bacon; fresh vegetables; all kinds of stuff laid out. I had just eaten, so I was limited to what I could stuff in my face for a short period of time. A couple of other thru hikers were there as well. Spicy and his three friends from college (all extremely good looking girls), we sat there and ate and drank beer. Yeunglings. We hung around for a few hours. I went in and used their laundry facility and their shower, because I still hadn¢t gotten around to doing that in town. I stayed there until about 10:30 at night. Finally, Bean, myself, Jersey Fresh and Free Radical (he was staying there and sharing the house with Spicy also) walked back to the hostel around 10:30. I stayed up later than everyone else. I was the last one in the whole place still awake, knowing I wasn¢t going to get to sleep too long. I went to bed at probably close to midnight. That was it for this day.