Thanks to my brother Paul, we had great maps for our trip. The Appalachian Trail is one of the few trails that is almost completely recorded in a database. He printed out the sections we were hiking and I uploaded them in my GPS watch. We also had googlemaps in my phone. We tended at first to rely on the printed maps, or Paul did, until he realized that it is possible to read them upside down. In other words, I would tell him that we have an easy hike to the next shelter, it's all downhill and then it would be straight uphill instead. We learned from the through hikers that indeed there is an 'app for that' and I bought the Guthooks app for the AT...but Paul never did truly trust a computer.
One of the big deals for me on the map, was trying to figure out where that convenience store was. We kept hearing stories of, you come to a road, turn left to go to a hostel and take a shower, turn right and walk half a mile to the convenience store. I was pretty sure we were going to make it by lunchtime that day, and was already planning my meal. Now, you must understand, that normally, I would turn my nose up at a fast food place for food, much less a gas station, but take me out in the woods for 5 days and I'm ready for any kind of food, no matter what the transfat, or corn syrup content is. As we hiked, we were asking hikers that passed us from the other direction if we were close to road. At one point we met a nice woman about our age that was taking a day hike with her two dogs. She was tall, thin, quite athletic, and her dogs were big, white fluffy dogs, like German Spitz or something like that. Actually, one was white and the other was covered with mud, and the lady explained that the one dog never passed a stream without taking a splash. The dogs paid us no mind at all, and merely wandered about, smelling every tree they came to. Their owner told us that we weren't all that far from the store, but unfortunately, to get there, we would have to hike two and a half miles down off the trail, and another half mile to the store...but she would be glad to give us a ride if we went to the parking lot and waited for her to finish her hike.
That sounded good to us, and that is how we came to do our first hitching-a-ride as backpackers. Apparently, this is very common in the area, and every hiker we met spoke of hitching rides with friendly locals. Our lady turned out to have a very nice Volvo wagon and I immediately became conscious of the fact that I had been on the trail for five days without a bath, and it seemed that the dogs were aware of this as well. They stayed in the back part of the car with their paws over their noses the whole short trip.
Soon, we were at the store of my dreams, and although in reality it was the kind of store that I would drive right by, this time it was perfect. I was like a construction worker that just got paid in there. I had two slices of pizza, a muffin, and grabbed all kinds of junk food for later. I even bought some instant mashed potatoes to show that I had a little bit of class. I got a cup of coffee in an old carafe that looked like it was made about five hours before I got there and it tasted just like Starbucks. The pizza was sitting in a little glass case under an infared lamp by the cash register and it was better than any pizza I'd ever had before.
Meanwhile, Paul is asking the Indian lady that runs the store if she could make him a special egg sandwich, where the biscuit had never been touched by grease that contained any animal fat. I'm not sure what she did in the back room with that biscuit, but Paul seemed satisfied with the result.
To top all of that off, our lady was waiting in the parking lot to give us a ride back to the trail! We both offered to buy her some gas, or anything she wanted to eat, but somehow I got the impression, that she would usually drive right by this store just like I would.
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