July 2 BLISTERSWe broke camp early as we had planned a long day. We hiked hard and after 10 miles reached Pine Grove Furnace Park around noon.\u00a0 There is a hiker challenge at the concession stand in the park. The challenge is to eat an entire 1\/2 gallon of ice cream in one sitting. I’m pretty sure Castaway could have done it but since we planned on hiking 7 more miles he settled for 2 cheeseburgers, an ice cream cone, and a bowl of ice cream. Castaway grabbed some pastries and snacks for the road too.However, we did get to see two other thru hikers, Banjo and Two-Thirds take the ice cream challenge.\u00a0 They did it, but later told us they took a three hour nap before they could continue hiking.\u00a0 When we left the park to continue on, Backpacker and Jack had arrived and were ordering their half gallons too.\u00a0Unfortunately, I have developed a pretty severe blister problem, 7 blisters in all.\u00a0 I taped them\u00a0today\u00a0and pushed thru until about the 16th mile when I could barely walk because of the pain.\u00a0 I did “surgery” once we reached camp\u00a0tonight\u00a0and they are all drained and bandaged now. The plan is to try to hike out\u00a0tomorrow\u00a0but if I can’t take it, we will come up with an alternate plan.\u00a0I have to say, Nate’s been an amazing hiker.\u00a0 I’m enjoying the time with him on the trail and he’s been really helpful now that I’m “injured”. He polished off two hamburgers pretty easily at the concession stand and I think a few more days on the trail and he could match Castaway’s appetite.\u00a0 Nate has a trail name now. It’s Seeds. Castaway named him on account of the sunflower seeds he’s been eating on the trail….after Nate rejected his initial idea of Sunflower for his name. Haha.\u00a0Aunt Donna…we did 15 miles on day one, 13 miles on day two, 17 miles\u00a0today, and have 13 miles left for\u00a0tomorrow.\u00a0Karen Meehan<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
July 2 BLISTERSWe broke camp early as we had planned a long day. We hiked hard and after 10 miles reached Pine Grove Furnace Park around noon.\u00a0 There is a hiker challenge at the concession stand in the park. The challenge is to eat an entire 1\/2 gallon of ice cream in one sitting. I’m […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-607","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-appalachian-trail","category-outdoors"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dalelafferty.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/607","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dalelafferty.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dalelafferty.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dalelafferty.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dalelafferty.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=607"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/dalelafferty.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/607\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":960,"href":"https:\/\/dalelafferty.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/607\/revisions\/960"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dalelafferty.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=607"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dalelafferty.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=607"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dalelafferty.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=607"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}