Do What You Can

We had  hoped that November seventh and eighth would be the days we hiked the remaining miles of the Maryland section, giving us our first completed state. But with Jake's hip hurting, we didn't want to get 5 miles in to a 10 mile hike and realize he couldn't make the remaining distance. Fortunately some of the next section was crisscrossed by several roads making a few short sections we thought we could tackle during the work week. 

Since Jake is working remote right now, and I'm reserving some time off from dogsitting to make this possible, we were able to spend the week in the area. After a full day of rest, we headed out on Tuesday to try our first tiny section: an almost half a mile, up from a small side road to the parking lot of the Maryland's Washington Monument. This monument actually predates the DC version, although it's not nearly so tall. Since that went well with no pain, we followed up with a one mile lunchtime section that connected with the portion we had hiked on Sunday. Then he took a couple more days off to heal before the weekend. 

On Saturday we filled in some gaps and hiked a total of 5.1 miles over 3 small sections, repositioning our cars in between. This was to make sure we had to opportunity to stop if things were hurting, and meant we didn't have to carry much with us. The longest section was the 2.5 miles from the Washington Monument up to Boonesboro road, which connected the two midweek hikes. 

While moving the cars we had to use earplugs riding in Jakes car, because one night the preceding week we had left it for several hours in a Walmart parking lot and gone to a nearby McDonald's to stress eat fast food and distract ourselves from the election by streaming some shows using their wifi. During that time, someone came to Jake's car, and, despite the fact that it was parked near the busy grocery entrance, they got under his car and stole the catalytic converter. This meant that our exhaust was disconnected from the muffler, making the car exceptionally loud. Luckily, this wasn't something that affected our ability to drive the car, so we resolved to wait to fix it until we were back home, away from the area. 

The other two sections we did connected farther south, although we hiked everything in a northbound direction. I still generally want to get the NOBO experience, and don't want to find myself avoiding hard climbs by switching up directions. The other two pieces we hiked Saturday connected from the Reno Monument up to the half mile we did just below the Washington Monument. 

Yes it was quite a bit of hopping around. I will write more about the thru hike options and names (NOBO, SOBO, flip flop, leap frog) another day, but I think our sort of random but generally nobo sections should be called Quantum Leap. 

Jake was feeling good, but the next section of trail was over 6 miles road to road, and a lot of elevation gain. We both thought a flat section would be a better idea, and since we weren't camping, we could drive closer to home at night, and split up the return trip a little. So we chose a section along a ridge that ran beside the Blue Ridge Parkway in Virginia. We covered the 6 miles of trail easily in terrain that looked dramatic with brilliant sassafras leaves in the clearings and full fall colors in the valleys below, but was warm enough for t-shirt and shorts, and gently rolling land. We went really slow, took a long lunch and paused in the middle of the second half for a sun induced nap among the leaves. 

Overall a lovely weekend, but one that left us with 16 miles yet to do in Maryland, and one very loud car.