Miles 11.9 Camped at mm 57.2 Now is not the ideal time in the journey to find out that the food I packed for the next five weeks gives me Heartburn. All of it. And yet here were are. And there ya go. I barely slept. I dreamed of mansions with slippery floors and me wearing a beautiful gown, lying face down on the floors and scooting myself this way and that with my hands, Read more…
Miles 11.7 Camped at mile marker 45.3 A mouse pooped in my cup overnight. No shit. He pooped right there in my fucking cup. Like, 15 little poops. Anji says he had a party in there. I was like, yeah woo-hooo. Little fucker. I went down to the stream and rinsed out my cup and scrubbed it with sand and brought it back to camp and we boiled it with filtered water and soap and Read more…
Miles 13.3 Camped at mile marker 33.5 Anji was actually pretty lucky she didn’t share a tent with me. I farted up a storm all night, and it was raining, so I couldn’t even open the door. Oh man, it was bad. Eventually, the night was almost over, and we got up at 4am. We hit the trail by 5:15. Now, if you get freaked out at all, I’m happy to take the lead, I Read more…
Miles 11.5 Camped at mile marker 20.2 We woke at 5:15 to get a jump start on the day. There was another hellstorm on the horizon, and we needed to make some miles. We were probably loud and a little obnoxious, but we needed to worry about us, after all, so we shook out our tents and our wet rain flys and packed up and took off. And we probably woke up everybody else, but Read more…
It wasn’t as hard as I expected, getting up at 2:15 am. We dashed here and there, stuffing my duffle bag and Anji’s pack and gear, wrapped in black plastic bags and adorned with address labels, into the car. And we guzzled coffee, and we were off. Into the night. Into the terminal, and then into the dark tube of the aircraft. Relegated to the back of the plane due to poor check-in planning on Read more…
Miles 5.5 Bonus miles to the cafe 1 PCT Mile 151.8 It’s going to be sunny and beautiful today, Anji said. I can’t wait! I looked out of my tent at the rain cloud enveloping us. Oh, I said. It’s gonna rain in 3….2….1…. crap. Our fingers turned red with the cold as we stuffed our wet tents one more time into their bags. I pressed my fingers to my face to warm them for Read more…
Miles 11.6 PCT Mile 146.4 The wind grabbed my tent and shook it in its teeth. I was a ragdoll. FLAPFLAPFLAPFLAP said my tent. The rain smacked it around and I Cowered a little bit. It was barely midnight. A long six more hours of that ensued and it was finally time to try to get out of the tents. We put together a whole plan. Anji packed up her tent, leaving the rain fly Read more…
Miles 13.9 PCT Mile 134.8 Anji says I smell earthy. We all know what that means. We’d been hiking uphill for hours. The views filled with layers upon layers of mountains beyond. Some hills red, mostly dark green, some little corners covered in bright green grass. We’d been carrying 5.5 liters of water with us. We decided to skip the infamous Mike’s Place, which was a water stop, and opted to filter water from a Read more…
Miles 11.4 PCT Mile 120.9 It was 6pm, the sun was behind the hill, it was really cold, and I wasn’t wearing any pants. We started the morning by getting our wet tents packed up, the marine layer slowly burning off once again, and tried to take a shortcut to the post office. We hopped a fence and found an old trail through the closed golf course. We took it and wandered around and got Read more…
Miles 6.9 PCT Mile 109.5 The marine layer just did not want to burn off. Our tents were soaked from the misty morning, and the sun couldn’t find its way through. We shook out our tents the best we could, packed them up sopping wet, and were on our way. Just in time for the marine layer to burn off… We crawled around on the hillsides in the same old brush for a short while Read more…