Date: 2003-06-02
From: Rockfish Gap

To: Calf Mountain Shelter
Miles today: 7.0
Weather: clear sky

From Rockfish Gap to Calf Mountain Shelter. After having gone home for 9 days to Florida, I am finally back on the trail again. In a lot of ways it feels like starting over. I¢m walking a lot slower. I feel clumsy. Even the trekking poles seem clumsy..where before they were like a part of me. Now I have to try and consciously use them. I don¢t know if it¢s just because I got the new ones and they are weighted differently or what. I think it¢s just because I got out of the habit of using them. The train ride back up was uneventful. The train got off on time and we got in on time. I spent most of the time in the lounge where there were no people. I was reading, catnapping and eating. Kelly picked me up about 2:15 from the train station in Richmond. We drove to her house because she had forgotten the new trekking poles there. I gave her the bag of stuff I had to send back home. The stuff I was wearing. Various clothes, books and the pictures that she had wanted me to bring for her to see. I also brought the other voice recorder with the first part of my journal. The trail from Rockfish Gap to this shelter was a nice trail. You could tell that a lot of people had walked on it. There were some rocks and there were some roots¢¦but for the most part it was a well grated trail. You could see or hear the Blue Ridge Parkway for most the time that I was walking along it. I actually ended up crossing it two times. I started at about 6:15 from Rockfish Gap and didn¢t get to the shelter here until almost 9 o¢clock. It was just getting dark. I had to finally pull out my headlight to walk the rest of the way to the shelter. Earlier in the day, Kelly and I spent the day ..going first to her house and then we stopped at the gas station. She took me to the post office and I mailed another box to Linden¢¦..a bit of stuff I had forgotten and then we went to eat at this restaurant recommended by the outfitter. Oh yeah, we went by the outfitter too looking for various stuff. I ended up just getting a copy of the 2003 data handbook and that was it. Then the guy at the outfitter told us to go eat at this place that had fairly good steaks and he was right¢¦they were good. I ended up having a 12oz prime rib which was fairly good. The salad was excellent was though. They did something with the cheese that was on top that made it a really good salad. Kelly ended up having the sesame encrusted tuna which she ordered well done..against my advice and it turned out to be a little dry. But that was ok. Earlier in the day, just before I had gotten to the media towers on the trail, I had found a disposable camera with 25 pictures taken on it laying off to the side of the trail. I went ahead and picked it up and when I got to the shelter it ended up being one of the guys at the shelter and he was very glad that he had gotten it back. He was the only one that was awake I think. There were like four other people in sleeping bags, they were already zonked out at 9 o¢clock. I was looking around, wrote in the register for the shelter and then started hunting out a place to hang the hammock. Almost ran right into somebody else who also had a hammock set up in the woods. So, I finally found a place for mine. Ended up messing around until now, basically, 11 o¢clock at night. Just trying to get this taken care of so I don¢t fall behind on it. Goodnight.