shelterrr

i bought my tent tonight!! =D i'm so excited! i got an msr hubba hubba AND its footprint for $225 shipped from rei. a guy on BPL replied to my post on the used gear forums and told me that i could get last year's hh on clearance for $170. i called the store in asheville and they didn't have any in stock. i had to call all the way out to california to find a store that had the clearance tent in stock, but i should have it here in the next week! =)

so i've got two out of the big three: pack and shelter. now i just need a bag. =) i'm heavily leaning towards the campmor down 20+ bag, but we'll see how everything goes here in the next little bit. perhaps i can buy a better quality used bag for about the same price. 

if i were my dog, i'd have an excitement pee right now.

still on the fence...

so i haven't updated in a while, but that doesn't mean i haven't been reading and researching and wasting time online looking and dreaming about gear and routes and mail drops and shelters and whatnot. i actually found a website that lets you organize all your favorite websites. it's called pearltree and i like it. here's my hiking pearltree... http://pear.ly/M9n5

i wound up losing four of my toenails on the foothills trail! =) the first two came off within a week or two, but the other two didn't come off until just last week. i had no idea the last two were even injured. i kinda consider myself a badass now. 

i bought my pack for the AT last night!!! :) i'm so excited! i was at wal-mart a few weeks ago and i was just perusing through the camping section and i noticed that they carried actual backpacks. i picked up a coleman max and it looked like a decent enough pack. i didn't buy it, but i made a mental note to google it when i got home. i never did, and then just last night i ran across a review on whiteblaze that actually said it was a really good starter pack. i googled it, and all the reviews gave it 5 *s. i tried to find it on wal-mart's website, and they said that they no longer carried it, so i got in my truck and ran to wal-mart to see if they still had it. lo and behold, i got the very last one. :) it didn't even have any of the tags on it so i couldn't see what the features and specs on it are, and when i got it home i was very pleasantly surprised to see that it even comes with its own pack cover! here's a video review of it i found, and i even learned more about the shoulder straps (cause they don't fit exactly right w/the hip belt and i just figured i'd have to deal with it - turns out - ajustableeee).

things really seem to be coming together for me to hike this trail. i still need to sell my truck; the two guys who've looked at it have fallen through. maybe i need to drop the price. i dunno. anyway, a friend of mine's boyfriend was deployed to afghanistan this weekend and he said i could borrow his jeep for the month of march while i figure out what the heck i'm doing. so i don't have to sell my truck and then rush into buying a piece of crap that'll get me to springer. i can just sell my truck and get out from under that note, and then use a car that i can give back in a month. how awesome is thattt... plus my landlord might buy my washer & dryer, so that'll give me extra cash money for the trail. 

nick is going to wind up taking jolie i believe, but i'll still have to hike with swayze. which will be fine, i'm sure. i just know i couldn't handle hiking with two dogs on the trail, and jolie wouldn't be able to make it anyway. with her short little boxer nose, she just overheats way too fast in the summertime. swayze, though, is gonna love it. i'll need to take her to the vet and get her UTD on all of her vacs before i head out; it'll be a little early (i don't think she's due til the end of may), but it's better than having to find a random vet while we're on the trail. 

basically, i'm so frickin' frackin' excited. i think this is going to be one of those very last-minute, pack your shit and go things if it does happen, though. my finances are the absolute only thing holding me back from this journey. if i won a million dollar lottery tomorrow, i wouldn't go to italy or vegas (i don't think you could pay me to go to vegas?) or cancun or anywhere other than springer mountain. it's extremely weird to know that your heart is someplace it's never been before.

also, as a side note, i renewed my subscription to equimax last week. i don't think i hate the horse world. i think i'm just tired of shitty employers, and there are a lot of shitty employers in the horse industry. i'd actually love to get back into the western discipline. wear my boots and be a cowgirl again. if the AT falls through, i'll hopefully wind up on a reining farm. :) 

so much for the rest of the dump...

so... i'm roughly 60 days away from springer. O M G.

as far as finishing my thoughts on the foothills... i guess i was just surprised at how little we actually needed. i've been looking through whiteblaze ever since the AT bug realllly hit me, back at the end of july. granted, joshua carried the tent, but we didn't really have a whole lot of... well, stuff. the two huge main things that i carried were my sleeping bag and my food bag. my sleeping pad was on the bottom of my pack. two water bottles. that was the vast majority of everything. i had an extra pair of socks.

the only things that joshua had that i didn't carry myself were a tent, the first aid kit, and the water purification system.

so really, if i were going to hike all by myself this march, i'd need to buy a pack, a sleeping bag, a tent, some sort of water purification system, a few band aids and a lot of food.

foothills trail - complete! :)

so a friend of mine and i thru-hiked the foothills trail this past weekend. i'm officially a thru-hiker! i had so much fun and deep down, i enjoyed every minute of it, even if it didn't show on the surface at all times. the scenery was gorgeous, the weather was decent (considering the forecast, it was perfect)... it was, all in all, an experience i am so glad i went through.

there were a few times on the trail when i thought to myself, "would i really want to do this for six months on end? would i really want to walk 2,100 miles?" and the answer was generally a resounding, "yes!" i hadn't physically prepared myself at all for this trip. i'd never backpacked, so i didn't know what it'd be like hauling around a 35# pack for days on end. i regularly walk my dogs to the park, but a 3-mile round-trip walk in the lowcountry is nothing compared to a 5-mile uphill ascent. had my friend not been there, i wouldn't have pushed myself the way i did and i wouldn't have done the 77 miles in five days.

those five days were a constant cardio workout. i know you're not technically supposed to wear cotton, but i did wear a tshirt underneath my jacket. i'd get so hot in some sections of the trail (even with snow on the ground) that i'd have to come out of my jacket and hike in only a tshirt. i still don't understand how my friend rarely ever came out of his rainjacket. i would have burned up. is this a sign of poor endurance, my overheating in such a short timespan? o.O

the first night in the woods, we bear bagged, but it didn't really work out all that well, and i don't think it would have been a sufficient enough job to keep them away if they had come out. the rest of the time, we slept with our food bags in the tent. we cooked right beside the tent (instead of the recommended distance of 50'? away from the tent), and we never had a problem.

we used a clip flashlight tent, and while my friend hated it from the get-go, i only found myself disliking it when we'd wake up in the mornings and there'd be a ton of condensation in the tent around us. there's nothing like waking up wet when you've got a roof over your head. he said it was because of the mesh on the tent. i'm wondering if it wasn't the condensation of our breath? but he dismissed that and chalked it up to the mesh. either way... i won't be getting a clip flashlight.

i had a regular sleeping pad, and he bought me a thermarest before the trip but for some reason i didn't take it. i guess i just slept with the regular one that night in the van, so i figured i'd stick with it throughout the trip. i shouldn't have. i never got a peaceful night's sleep because of the pressure points my hips and the ground would cause. i'll have to look into the thermarests. i didn't get it back from him before we departed.

i've read skywalker's book on his trail life. if there's one thing that got on my nerves about him and bill bryson, it was how much they didn't really seem to enjoy being out in the woods. bryson never even finished the trail, and skywalker slept in every hotel he could find, it seemed like. it wasn't until we'd been on the trail for 3 days and i had a bum ankle and it was getting dark and cold and it looked like we'd have to wind up setting up a wet tent that i understood just why they felt the way they did. we walked into the public restrooms of one of the national parks on the trail, and they were clean and had running water that you didn't have to purify and there was even heatlamps! and you didn't have to pee in the woods! it was when i was there, standing in front of the hand dryer and drying out my buff, that i realized at that moment, i was no better than skywalker. i could see where he was coming from.

the one thing that amazed me was how quickly my body adapted to the demands of the trail. i was never really sore because i kept working those same muscles, getting the lactic acid out of my system. i fell a few times on the second day because of wet leaves and snow/ice and i hurt my ankle a bit. i was sore from that, but as far as my back being sore or my abs being sore or my legs being sore... it never really happened. granted, i felt like my legs were fatigued to the point of failure at times, but they never really ached.

i will never, ever, EVER get another protein bar with malitol in it. i know the label warns of gastrointestinal upset and diarrhea, but i never even let it get to that point because the two varities of bars that i got were disgusting and i could barely eat half of them. i bought them thinking, "oh hey there protein. i'll need you." silly. i will definitely stick to snickers from here on out. joshua even had the fun-size snickers bars. for the mini-boost, i suppose. he also had a bag full of dried apples, banana chips, and cranberries that he'd concocted from the things he'd bought from wal-mart. very good, i'd say. i also should have brought more mashed potatoes on the trail. the third night, my dinner consisted of mashed potatoes, smoked cheddar cheese, and real bacon bits i'd packed in. as soon as that hit my lips, i almost cried it was so good. i will definitely have to remember more mashed potatoes, more fruit and snickers, and less malitol. oh, and less ramen i think.

i took a lot of clothing on this trip... i took a scarf (which i didn't need and will never take again because now i have my buff), my underarmour shirt (which if i would have actually worn, i would have probably roasted alive in it), and a lot of other stuff i didn't need.

i will finish this dump later.. but for right now, i'm sleepy. i just wanna write all this down before i forget it. :)

i was talking to my mama today on the phone, and she asked me what i'm going to do in february when my lease is up... whether i'll be month-to-month here in the townhouse on my lease or whether i'll plan on moving, etc.

i told her i didn't know what i was going to do because our landlord hasn't made up his mind on whether he'll sell the place or not. she mentioned me maybe renewing my ad on equimax and trying to get out of charleston. i told her i didn't want to worry about that right now, and when she tried to push the issue, i told her i didn't want to talk about it.

i've not definitively come out just yet and said, "in march, i will thru-hike the appalachian trail," but our little snippet that we had this afternoon makes me think that she's not going to support my decision to get the hell out of society for a while.

i'm just so tired of the daily grind of living to work. i majored in horses and yes, i have a bachelor's degree, but the thought of getting back into the horse world almost sickens me. i don't want to work with horses for the rest of my life. i would love to just win the lottery and give it all back to society and then just keep enough to keep me on the trail for the rest of my life.

or i'd like to thru-hike the app trail and then use it as a resume-builder and maybe get on board with an outfitter or something. i just regret majoring in horses and i should have never done it. it's not gotten me anywhere in the two or three years that i've been out of school.

anyways. so i guess this was basically to vent because my mama's pushing me towards getting back into my field of study, but i've decided i don't like my field of study, and i'm sick of working right now because i'm working more than 40 hours a week at two jobs that are barely paying my bills.

i'm getting old. i've been a workhorse for almost ten years now. i worked all the way through school, and for the last four years, with maybe two six-month breaks in between, i've held at least two jobs. can i please just say that i'm EFFIN SICK of working? i know everybody in society has to do their parts, and i KNOW i don't have it rough because my parents take care of me when my finances fall short and i need my wisdom teeth taken out or my truck has to be towed because the ignition coil busted in the middle of the road, but i just feel like i need a break. does that make me sound like a spoiled little brat? by no means am i rich, but you don't have to be to be a brat.

blah. i guess i'm just stressing out a little because i'd really prefer to not have to move or get another job or anything come march. i'd rather just hit the trail and hike my little heart out.