Date: 2005-04-19
From: Bland, VA (Wytheville, VA)

To: stealth camp near VA 615, Laurel Creek
Miles today: 6.9
Weather: clear sky

start: Bland, VA (Wytheville, VA)finish: stealth camp near VA 615, Laurel Creek miles: 6.9day: 43SouthboundGoldilocks is feeling much better today. He's pestering me to go eat the motel's free breakfast so he can then go and eat at Shoney's. Back to normal. We actually only ate at the motel - they offered lots of good stuff.We showered again and lazed around until about noon, as we only have 15 miles to hike over the next two days until we get picked up by Stumpknocker. We walked about a mile to the grocery store and bought some eats for this next short leg of the journey.Just as we were resigning ourselves to a long 4+ mile walk across town to get to a hitching spot, a Wytheville Transit bus pulled up next to me. Hmmm, for fifty cents apiece we can ride around and go wherever we need to - like across town! Doh. We got dropped off at Subway to get sandwiches for tonight's dinner, and walked over to Wendy's to eat today's lunch (it really is all about food, and I'm still losing weight.) Finally around 2:00 we started to hitch the long way to Bland to avoid the interstate. A country road winding up and over Big Walker Mountain. We only waited a minute or so and a young lady stopped for us. It was nice talking with her and she had lots of questions about our trip. She took us halfway to Bland, dropping us at the top of the mountain. She had gone way out of her way to do this, and turned around and headed back down the mountain.Silence and great views. No traffic. None. Hmmm, we could be in for a long wait up here. I had just declared this a near impossible hitch (we'd only been waiting five minutes though) and a woman driving a pickup going the other direction - the way we just came - asked if we needed a ride and where to. We told her we were trying to get to the the AT trailhead in Bland and she turned around and took us there - clearly 10 miles out of her way. We got there as fast as if we'd had a car. Go figure the kindness of strangers. We sure have a lot of paying back to do somewhere down the line. It should be fun.We had allowed the whole day for this work - getting from non-trail-town Wytheville to Bland. Now we're here and it's only 3:00. Nothing to do but what we do best. Start hiking. But this time it's strange. We're hiking south. From Bland to VA 623 by tomorrow evening. Fifteen whole miles. Boy are we gonna be early.We hiked for a couple hours to a this nice camping area 7 miles in, leaving 8 for the morning. On the way we ran into Team Vanity heading north - the correct direction. Some family members had joined them for the day as well. It was good to see them as we had only briefly run across them in Damascus, and the last time before that was before the big snowstorm April 2nd. They took one look at us and exclaimed that they had heard Goldilocks was sick (and that we'd gotten off the trail!!) Well, we haven't gotten off, duh, but we can't figure out how the news traveled so fast. They heard from Johnny Blaze, but where did he hear it? He had been in Bland and just hiked north from there this afternoon. It sure would have been good to see him. I hope we can catch him and others in a week or so if we hurry (this is the problem with taking even a few days off...) I guess Johnny may have read it in my journal which got posted only this morning. Or could he have run across Cri!spy? We may never know. But don't try to keep any secrets out here - the grapevine is alive and well When we got to this campsite area we found ... TRAIL MAGIC! A huge cooler full of ice and juice drinks. Excellent. Thanks so much to our unknown benefactor. Today was a hot one and we had worked up a sweat even on our short miles.--moosie