The last few days have not been good to me! Right now I'm sitting in Woodstock, VT behind the wheel of a rental car bawling my eyes out because I just had to leave my good friend and hiking partner behind on the trail to hike on without me. I feel like half of me is missing.
Since we left Hanover I have been in pain. My knees, which have given so much in the past 400 miles or so of rocks, roots, and high steps have not adapted to this new "gentler" sloping terrain. I feel at times like I'm having to learn to walk all over again. I may not have helped the situation by switching to new shoes in Hanover. They're the same as before, but these have not been mud soaked and worn to a flexibility like the previous pair. My feet just don't feel like they're making contact the ground correctly. Add my current situation and pain to the realization that we are now massively behind schedule, and in order to make up miles and have a hope of finishing (or at least getting through the high altitude of the Smokeys (NC)) before really bad winter weather, and we had already discussed the need to do longer days, in shorter daylight hours. We did some bigger faster mileage yesterday, and I paid for it last night. It's turning cooler, I was cold every time I stopped for breaks yesterday, and this morning was downright cold. A daily diet of painkillers is making sick to my stomach and I can't keep my food dowm. Having enough energy to hike when I can't eat sufficiently is a joke. I was hardly even able to function to get my pack packed in the cold this morning.
I'm feeling guilty that I'm slowing Chill down, he can hike much harder and longer than I can when his back isn't causing him pain and my slowing us down may ultimately cost him his hike. We had agreed before the hike that if this situation came up that we would split up. Now is the time to face up to that situation. I was so sure that the lower terrain and gentler trail would be the end of my knee problems, but it appears that my poor knees dislike sloping lower hills even more than jagged rocky steep mountains.
I told Brian to go on without me, but of course, he didn't want to leave me sitting there sick, so we managed to get ourselves to Woodstock, VT. Not the cheapest place on earth to be stranded with no plan! Now that I'm not hiking and and eating food that didn't have to be rehydrated, and sleeping in a warm bed I'm feeling physically better, except for my knees and back, but I know I'm not up to continuing. I have looked at options for getting back to Florida, staying somewhere round here a while, or skipping down the trail some miles and waiting out my knees a while. There is no cheap option, but in the course of looking at the options I did figure out that a one way car rental to somewhere, was probably the best option. We spent some time running errands in the car: picking up bounce boxes I'd mailed ahead, doing laundry and resupply for Brian, copying photos to CDs, etc., but we were only postponing the inevitable. Brian has a trail to hike, and I can't continue right now.
The question of where to drive to has been resolved by my good freind Mary. She is in New York state somwhere, and has offered a bed for as long as I need it. It's a couple couple hundred miles from the AT, but if I can drive there, I can drive back, right? I'd love to see her for a while, and it could still keep the possibility of returning to the trail alive, which is not likely to happen if I return to Florida for a break.
I'll be driving there as soon as I can clear my eyes enough to see the road.
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