Date: 2008-10-09
From: Mason Dixon Line

To: Virginia Border
Miles today: 43.5

The Vermont Mafia and I rocked the quad state challenge today: 43.5 miles, 4 states, 19 hours....and we did it dressed as The Village People. I am not making any of this up.We got up around midnight to make our day as long as possible. It was really hard to get going, my body really wanted to be asleep. Being out on the trail you let the sun dictate your sleep, and being awake when it was really dark is difficult. We got our stuff together, put our costumes on and hiked back to the Mason Dixon line to and made two states in the first minute.About our costumes: it started when Defaults mom sent some orange hunters vests to the Vermafia to make sure they didn't get shot. Flamebo wore one on a slack day and said she was going to wear it again on our quad state challenge. I said the rest of us should dress like the village people to complete the look. It seemed like a good idea, but it's hard to find village people costumes at Walmart in the middle of the night. Flamebo was the construction worker, not too hard; although she couldn't find a hardhat. Beef was the native american, she already had some feathers and Flamebo applied some warpaint. I of course was the "motorcycle enthusiast", but not in the village people sense. I couldn't find any leather or studded clothing at walmart, and well, thats just not my thing anyways. I decided to go for the modern motorcyclist look with tatooed arms, a necklace, and a skull and bones bandanna. Not real authentic, but the best I could do. Default was a hippie, which wasn't one of the village people but we didn't care. EKG wanted to be police officer, but she made a really cute cowboy and so she went that route instead. Again, we did the best we could and had fun with it.The first 6 hours of our quad state challenge was the hardest, I kept wanting to fall asleep. Every time we took a snack break I would just nap in the middle of the trail for 5 minutes. I'm not one to fall asleep in the dirt usually, but I was pretty tired. Once daylight came around, the Vermafia broke out some spray on glitter and went crazy with it on themselves. I even let them glitter up my beard, just to confuse people. A lot of people on the trail that day thought I had real tattoos on my arms, pretty funny. I was waiting for someone to ask where I got them so I could tell them I was in prison, but no one ever did. We flew through the day, taking little breaks here and there. Once daylight came around I felt a lot better and actually ate instead of sleeping on our breaks. We stopped by the Washington Monument and climbed the tower, but didn't stop for much else. Maryland proved pretty easy, I was suprised.I can't remember much of the day. We ran into Izzy and his son at a civil war battle memorial (Antietem?) and we promised to meet him the next day. We stopped at the Ed Garvey shelter for a break and where appalled at the stinkbugs that covered every square inch of the place. Then the trail went down a lot and we got excited cause that meant we where close to Harpers Ferry.The hardest terrain of the day was hiking the C&O towpath into Harpers ferry. This section is completely flat and straight, it drove us crazy is was so boring. It was also very hard packed and my feet hurt like crazy. We finally crossed the bridge into Harpers Ferry and took some pics and counted off our third state of the day: West Virginia. Nice town, too bad we got a little turned around and had to backtrack though. We made it out of town finally, across another bridge and started the climb up for our last mile. We had to take another break though as it was getting dark again and we needed to put on our headlamps.The climb up wasn't so bad. We finally got to a ridge and spent 15 minutes looking for the welcome sign to Virginia. There wasn't one, and it was a pretty big let down. We took our pic though and hiked a half mile down to a road where my dad was waiting for us.Got back to the hotel. While I took a shower (sitting down because I was so tired) my Uncle went out and got me the most delicious pizza ever. I only took two pieces and gave the rest to the vermafia; i thought about eating the whole thing but I might have felt bad about that. Then I passed out and slept well.So, the challenge wasn't all that difficult. I'm at the point now where the only thing that limits my hiking miles is daylight, but I'm not a big fan of the night hiking. Still, it was fun and I wasn't in that much pain.