Day 7- "100"

"On your marks, get set..."

Today started in a pretty good fashion. We got up on time, got everything set up in the bags fairly quickly, and decided to eat lunch on the trail while hiking.

Our goal was to meet my sister at 3:00 p.m., and we needed to cover 16 mi in 8 hours to do that.

We made great time most of the day. In most ways it was very similar to other days we hiked. You know: get up, pack up, eat up, and walk up...hill...a lot.

The last four miles or so was a climb around Hawksbill Peak, which I think is the largest mountain in the Shenandoah National Forest. Even if it's not, it sure felt like it!

There are rocky cliffs we had to walk along. And since it had been raining a lot the day before most of them were wet and running with water, or covered with mud. This slowed us down a bit, but we still kept a great pace. It might have been the thought of some different food, or maybe a shower that kept our steps light.

"One more hill"

It was about 90°, and very humid. Be paused at Rock Spring Hut to get a final drink of water, I decided to also pour some of that awesome Virginia Mountain Water on my head, a little bit of a spring shower. It felt amazing! I highly recommend it :-).

Passing the time

We knew we couldn't obsess about the steps in miles, it was driving us crazy. So we did things to occupy ourselves.

We named as many MLB, NFL, NBA, and NHL teams we could think of. We got all 32 NFL teams, all but four baseball teams, all but two NBA teams, and, well hockey? We missed nine of those. 😂

It was the time of year for caterpillars to hatch, they were everywhere. They were kind of fun to play with as we were moving along. They seem to have their own personalities, but all had the same goal, get up the tree and make a cocoon.

100 miles 

We cruised into the parking lot about 2:30, just 8 hours after we left. We had done 16 mi, making a total of 100 total miles. ChuckWagon got to neet the goal he set!

We enjoyed one more salted nut roll, and waited just a couple of minutes for my sister to pick us up.

"Real food"

Once my sister picked us up, we promptly removed our shoes, socks, and clothes, and put on clean ones.

We put on clean ones and placed the dirty ones in a bag to be cleaned, or burned, later. 👟🔥

As one can imagine, we were hungry! James had a medium pizza with black olives and banana peppers. I had a barbecue sandwich with a small side of coleslaw and collard greens, and half of my sister's BLT. It was fabulous!

We made it home, and took a magical shower, and went to bed.

Coming up...

I have a lot of video to edit, and some special people to thank, so I'll post that next :-)