Day 68 - Trout Creek VA 620 - VA 311
13.8 miles
Today was beautiful - sunny, blue sky, white puffy clouds. I felt like I broke through or found relief from the emotional weariness of this week.
My camera is operational again, but the back display is still not working. However, the eyepiece is working and the camera is taking pictures again. I am relieved.
We had a restful morning at camp, we didn't leave till 10 am. Tenacious Bling said it felt "like backpacking". She was referring to our previous experiences with backpacking, prior to thru-hiking, which were physically strenuous but for shorter periods of time and with a more relaxed pace. Ah, the good ol' days of backpacking.
The mountains through this area of Virginia are really beautiful. Today we hiked near the Dragon's Tooth, down Cove Mountain, a technically challenging area. We hiked a nine mile section without water but we did fine.
We tried really hard to keep our breaks to 15 minutes and were pretty successful, so that even though we left at 10 am we still managed almost 14 miles of hiking and were done in 8 hours, not quite the 2 mile/hour pace we're aiming for but better than previous days and that included the slow section down Cove Mountain. I'm proud of us today.
At 6pm we met Joe, from Four Pines Hostel, at VA 311. He picked us up and drove us to The Homeplace for supper. We also made arrangements for him to shuttle us back to the hostel to stay for the night and to slackpack our gear into Daleville tomorrow so we can hike those 20 miles with less weight on our backs. $40 slackpack + hostel + supper = an expensive two days on the trail, but it's totally worth it. We need this morale booster.
Supper tonight at The Homeplace in Catawba was amazing and definitely worth the visit. Our accommodations at Four Pines are in the Alpaca barn. (The Alpacas are in an enclosure and our sleeping area is a wide bench, a little wider than a sleeping mat, that runs along the barn wall. It's cozy and with the bench sleeping arrangement we're not on the concrete floor, thankfully.)
At dusk the kids chased fireflies and I tried in vain to take photographs, trickier to do without the back display I'm used to using. It was like a dream, the fireflies winking over the hillside. As a northerner I am captivated by these insects.
I'm sleeping next to a stranger tonight who is hanging in a hammock diagonal to my stretch of the bench. He's less than 3 feet away from me at the nearest point.
I'm pretty sure I'll never experience something like this again, a day's hiking in amazing beauty, followed by a satisfying, all you can eat supper at a "family-style" restaurant in rural Virginia, chasing fireflies and sleeping in Alpaca barn next to a stranger in a hammock. I don't want to forget this.
