Hiker Vacation
As if planning a thru hike was not enough, our mom was rescheduling a 2020 family vacation. We are not the only children in our family, in fact we have two other sisters which makes us only 1/3 of the vote of when to have the vacation. We ultimately decided the best time for the family trip would be May of 2022 right after our youngest sister graduated college…. and about halfway through our hike. At the time, this sounded like a good idea. We would be getting off trail for a few days anyway for the graduation why not add some more days a give ourselves a nice respite from trail life? We couldn’t have been more wrong.
One thing we had not anticipated at the beginning of the trail was that we would fall in with a tramily. Now we are getting off trail for 10 days only a month into our journey with them.
A week prior to us getting off, we broke off from the tramily to start pushing miles ahead in attempts to narrow our lag when we returned. It was 7 days of 25+ miles, including our first 30-mile day on trail. I have never been so hungry and so sore before.
We were picked up half-way through the Shenandoah at Thorton’s Gap. On that day we were more than happy to get in a vehicle and not hike. The morning was foggy with rain hanging in the air. You became damp just by walking through the moist air. More importantly it meant the week of hiking hell was over.
The graduation from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (Go Tar Heels) was the next day and then we departed on vacation to Iceland the day after. Our Iceland trip involved van camping, thru hiking meals, and daily hikes. One would think this would be adequate enough to keep us in the ‘thru hiker spirit’. It was NOT. Now this is not to say that we didn’t enjoy the vacation. Iceland was lovely and it was unique experience. It was just an experience that we might have enjoyed more if we were not in the middle of a thru hike.
Our biggest mistake was that once back in the United States, we spent less than 24 hours at home before returning to the trail. Jet lagged, hungry, not in the right mental head space. A recipe for disaster. Naturally we didn’t make it any easier on ourselves by deciding to do a 20 mile day that day… and then the next. Our bodies felt unwell to say the least. It was worse than starting off in Georgia. Everything hurt from backs, to hips- sore from the hip belt to shoulders aching. It was as if we had never backpacked before. Meanwhile our tramily is 150 miles ahead of us.
As punishment for what we forcing our bodies to endure, within three days Speedgoat came down with the flu. She was trooper and carried cold medicine, tissues, and cough drops with her on trail to still make miles. It all became too much and we admitted that we need time to rest. Thankfully we were in northern Virginia at this point which was only 40 minutes away from where we and our partners lived. They picked us up and we spent an additional 3 days off trail while Speedgoat recovered.
We would like to say we were smarter getting back on trail after all that. We returned with the intention of hiking 10-15 miles/day and working our way back-up to our typical millage. This was thrown out the window almost immediately. We did not know any of the hikers around us at this point and we had gotten back on in a hiker ‘lul’ - stuck between bubbles. We continued with our 20+ mile days trying to be somewhere, anywhere than where we currently where.
This is absolutely a first world problem. We weren’t enjoying our 6 month vacation from work and responsibilities because we had to get off to go on ANOTHER vacation in a different country. The moral of the tale for me is that we fell into the trap that is the #1 reason hikers quit a trail - it is not meeting up to your expectations.
Our AT thru hike will always be divided in my head between pre-Iceland and post-Iceland. In the “pre” section we were figuring it out just like everyone else around us. We had started to build a framework of what trail life means. Then in “post” we are 900 miles in and everything we thought we had learned (physical strength, trail community, etc.) was gone. It was akin to relearning trail, except this time we didn’t have a blank slate to build on. Instead we had a checklist where nothing was adding up.
Wrapping our minds around was difficult and easily our toughest section of trail. For the happy ending, it took us just about a month to finally catch our tramily. We hiked 20+ miles nearly everyday and took only one zero, but we did it! We reunited with them in the town of Warwick where we celebrated over beer, popcorn, and a drive-in movie.
You might also like
