6/6/12 741 miles
We all left town at different times. Kleenex left first, a day before the rest of us. She has a mail drop 80 miles north and needed to hurry to get there by Saturday morning. I wanted to walk around town in my new shoes for a while before heading into the woods so I left the next morning.
It’s odd how you can see so many people in town, but once on the trail, you can walk for hours without seeing anyone. I passed two shelters and finally stopped at the third 18 miles out of town. I thought I might be all alone at the shelter but several hikers showed up later. There was no place level to pitch my tent, and anyway it looked like rain, so I slept in the shelter with four others.
I guess I’m developing the thruhikers attitude about the preciousness of food. I dropped a piece of granola bar in the dirt, picked it up without a thought, and ate it. The standard joke about thruhikers is: a tourist drops some food on the ground, the thruhikers looks longingly at the food on the ground and asks, “Are you going to eat that?”