Trail Days

I am now back in Damascus, VA for Trail Days. This is a fairly big festival celebrating the Appalachian Trail. Lots of former hikers, and current thru hikers come back for this, as well as friends of the trail and a fair number of different gear companies. This makes it a great opportunity to see other thru hikers that you may have passed as well as getting your gear serviced. I have been able to get a new housing for my water filter, a new pair of socks, new hip and shoulder belts for my backpack, as well as pick up two free water bottles, plenty of stickers, a new wind shirt and plenty of free food. That was just on the first day.
I have also been running into plenty of people that I passed and spent either a night or two with. It is great to see who is still on the trail. Almost half the people I have talked to are in Pearisburg. Wwe are glad that we are ahead of the big wave. We still find room in shelters. Plenty of people, some that I knew and some I did not, have been reading my shelter journal entries. It is cool to have people talking about stories that you wrote down. Although some of my stories end up having multiple parts and I have had to fill in the missing pieces to some of them.
The ride down here was not too eventful. There were four of us, Shadow, Daddy-O, Peacock and myself starting from New Market. We had lunch at the school where Bigfoot works, and then piled in the suburban. We were faily noticable at the school, four thru hikers (clean ones) in a private religious high school. Although both Shadow and Peacock were wearing kilts, so it was only the beard that gave Shadow away, Peacock almost fit in.
On the way down we picked up a South bound section hiker named Stamp that Shadow had met. He had just gotten off the trail and had not yet had time to shower or wash his clothes. Normally we all smell as bad as he did, but not right then. We had all showered that morning, and did laundry the night before, so we had clean clothes on (we were still trying to get used to that). When Stamp got in the car the smell immediately changed. He then took off his shows and socks and we had to force him all the way to the back and open the windows. After a couple of minutes we were all able to breathe again. It is amazing how the hikers sense of smell changes. We do not smell ourselves until we have cleaned off. However when we are on the trail we can smell someone in perfum almost before we can see them.