Day 93

Goodbye Shenandoah National Park. Not going to miss all the strict rules on camping or the odd distances between huts but I will REALLY miss the waysides for food and beer. It was a nice cool morning packing up the tent. I think my sleeping pad is just getting worse. It was pretty flat this morning. Not gonna worry about that anymore but I’ll get to that topic shortly. On the way out of SNP, I came across another doe with her fawn and just barely caught it on camera. After that, I exited the park and made it to US Route 522 where me and Donuts kicked back and waited for the free trolley to take us into town. She dropped us off on Maine St where we headed to a hiker lounge called Basecamp. I’m just amazed by this! There is a connected hallway that accesses three businesses, the local outfitter, a bakery and Vibrissa Brewery. These businesses are working together to have hiker lounge available to us. After signing in at the outfitter, he took us into the back hallway to a door that goes to the hiker lounge. In there is a bathroom, shower room, large lockers where you can lock your pack away and industrial sized washer and dryer as well as a hiker box (take what you need & leave what you don’t need) and loaner clothes. I have a hotel booked here but there’s no laundry there so I went ahead and took a shower, put on loaner pajama pants and shirt then Donuts and I washed all our stuff together while we sat in the brewery having an amazing lunch and two beers (give them your trail name and the 2nd beer is free). I wish more businesses would do something like this that are near the trail. Shoot! I spent money now at all three businesses! I bought lunch and beer at the brewery, a pecan sticky bun at the bakery and the outfitter has my sleeping pad in size wide, which is what I originally wanted but couldn’t find anywhere. Thus I dropped more cash than I should have to just replace my pad with a nice rectangular wide pad. Now my arms don’t flop off. Yay! Oh, I’m spending a zero tomorrow. I know, I know. But there’s a reason. Prices are about to get stupid for Memorial Day weekend. It’s already costing me over $20 more tomorrow over what I’m paying tonight for my room but if I hike on tomorrow, I’ll be in another thunderstorm and my pace would get me to Harper’s Ferry on Monday, Memorial Day. It would NOT be a good idea trying to stay there, a place with tons of US war history, on Memorial Day. Also, the Appalachian Trail Concervancy (ATC) Headquarters is there and they will take a Polaroid of you standing in front of their sign and you can sign it and it goes into their hiker archives, which goes back years and you can look through them all. They’ll be closed on Monday for the holiday so I don’t want to get there until Tuesday. Harper’s Ferry will also mean finishing VA, the longest State on the trail. So let’s get all clean and dry and I’ll see ya out on trail on Saturday to get to Harper’s Ferry on Tuesday.