In Hot Springs

It's the morning of Saturday, March 19, and I woke up in a very comfortable bed, under a roof.  How odd.  A bed.  Last night I feasted on cheese chili fries, a local beer, and a ginormous hamburger on Texas Toast.  This is civilization, and I have to say that It's pretty darn nice.

I've made it through The Great Smoky Mountains National Park, across Max Patch, and into Hot Springs, NC.  Details on that trek will appear in a log format in another post.  I'm staying with friends in Asheville who are showing mind-blowing hospitality as well as intense interest in my trip... huge Thank You to The Strupps for taking such good care of me.

I'm taking a zero day today, time to get off my feet and rest, heal a little bit.  I'll resupply, update my consumables, fix stuff that's wearing, charge camera and phone batteries, communicate with folks, dry stuff out, do some planning, check weather, and start thinking about what's next.  It'll be a busy day, but busy in a whole new way.

One thing that I am seriously contemplating is my approach to movement.  I found myself in Georgia just awash in a sea of other hikers, people everywhere.  (One Ridge Runner told me that they are expecting twice the usual volume of Appalachian Trail starts this year -- 4,000 against a more typical 2,000 -- due to the movies A Walk In The Woods and Wild.)  So I pushed hard through Nantahala and kept pushing through The Smokies.  I made it from Fontana Dam, NC (start of GSMNP) to I-40 in 3 1/2 days. That was some really hard work, 20+ mile days on tough terrain.  Now I'm roughly a week ahead of "the bubble," and saw only one other hiker in Hot Springs, a renowned hiker town.

But that takes amazing amounts of effort to sustain, and this is absolutely not a race of any kind.  I can feel the effort all over my body, and after over a week can really use a break. So I'll likely slow down a bit, take more zero days to rest, and "play the weather" so that I don't slog through snow storms and torrential downpours every single time one comes along.  This weather changes the experience from tough challenge to something to be survived. If I'm going to finish, I'll have to be careful how much I ask my psyche to just grunt through. It's all part of the experience, but if I can bias towards less endurance and more enjoyment, I'll get farther.

So now I'm off to do laundry and inventory, look at maps and see if I can squeeze into a sports massage some time today. Oh, and I'll be posting logs of my actual daily experiences.  Feedback and comments welcome.

The journey continues...