Day: 032
Date: Friday, 26 May 2023
Start: Unnamed ridge at AT Mile 462.6
Finish: Damascus (AT Mile 471.0)
Daily Kilometres: 15.1 (ascent 830', descent 2,464').
GPX Track: Click here for Julie’s Strava & Photos
Total Kilometres: 799.5
Weather: Mild to warm and partly sunny.
Accommodation: Hostel
Nutrition:
Breakfast: Hiker hash & eggs/Chicken & bacon on biscuits
Lunch: Mexican sub
Dinner: Meatloaf & vegetables/Hamburger & chips, ice-creams
Aches: Nothing to report
Highlight: Breakfast at the Damascus Diner lived up to its reputation for quality and value. We got to the diner around 9:45am and joined fellow thru-hiker, Tassie, who had beaten us there. There were other thru-hikers there we recognized, and some we didn't, and the diner had an Appalachian Trail theme. Everybody was very friendly and we enjoyed our food and the long cold bottomless Coke Zeros.
Lowlight: None really.
Pictures: Click here
Map and Position: Click here for Google Map
Journal:
It began raining almost as soon as we got into our tent last night and our fellow campers, who had been setting up for a long night chatting (very audibly) around their fire, eventually gave up and went to bed as well. No nocturnal bear visitors either, but the rain was persistent for a large part of the night and dripped from the trees for the balance, so our tent fly was very wet when we packed up, but everything else stayed dry.
We rose a little earlier, 5:15am, so as to increase our chances for a timely arrival for breakfast at the Damascus Diner. Although much of the vegetation was wet, the trail itself wasn't too bad and we covered the eight-mile distance through the woods and rhododendron groves, most of it downhill, to Damascus in good time. Along the way we left Tennessee for the last time and are now in Virginia where we will be for a long time. Breakfast lived up to its reputation (see above) and after that we walked to the Post Office to collect our "General Delivery" mail.
We are making some changes in Damascus, primarily to lighten the weight of our packs, which are clearly among the heavier carried by thru-hikers. By choice, we have been carrying gear that other hikers don't, some of it for comfort, such as inflatable pillows and a three-man tent, some of it to better deal with adverse weather, such as heavier rain-jackets and warm clothing, and some it for blogging and reading. So, Dave has purchased a new very lightweight rainjacket and will be mailing his heavy jacket, laptop, related charging gear, eReader, gloves and thermal leggings to friends in the US, while Julie will be mailing her heavy rainjacket, some of her winter gear and her trekking poles (which she has not used on this trip). Tomorrow morning we will make a trip to the Post Office and send off this gear.
The downside for Dave will be that, from tomorrow, he will be blogging from his phone which probably means shorter posts and more typos. The formatting in the emails could also be a problem so, if they are unreadable, click through to the actual blog to read the posts.
After collecting our packages, we walked to Lady Di's Hostel, where we have a room for two nights. Lady Di, which is her trailname, hiked the AT in 2019 and liked Damascus so much she came back (she's retired), bought a large house and set up an up-market hostel that operates only for the ten-week thru-hiker season. Although very expensive by hostel standards, it does include a cooked breakfast and laundry and is immaculate. It's also Memorial Day long weekend in the US and accommodation in vacation locations is hard to find and expensive, so we are happy.
Since checking in we have had our laundry done and ventured the very short distance into town to get some other gear we need from one of the three outdoor stores.
Later, we ventured back to the Damascus Diner for a nice dinner and finished off with a waffle cone ice-cream on our walk back to the hostel. Not a bad day and looking forward to a full day off tomorrow.
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