So many people we’ve met already! This is a social trail, far more so than anything we’ve hiked before. 25–30 people start each day at the southern terminus, and the relative dearth of camping spots means you end up meeting practically all of them. There were well over
twenty people camped within 500 feet of us last night, and about ten within thirty feet.
Needless to say, the shared experience brings people together fast. There’s already a group of eight or ten of us that has become “the gang” for these first couple of days, and they’ve all gotten a big smile and loud “howdy!” from me as they’ve rolled into this campsite this afternoon. It’s a wide range of people: the reality-show actor participant from LA, the older woman and her much younger coworker from a Buddhist retreat, the young couple from Germany, the unbelievably-cute female newlyweds from Washington, the taciturn guy from Seattle…the list goes on. It makes a great balance: when we’re hiking it’s been just us, but, in the evenings, we have new people to meet and make friends with.
From everything I’ve heard, any one group of people rarely lasts more than a week or two — you get separated on the trail through sheer differences of pace, someone stays in a town much longer, or you just kinda get sick of someone and diverge. 😉 Already, there are people from the dinner at Scout and Frodo’s I feel certain I’ll never see again — the competitive brothers (21 and 26 years old) are probably far beyond us already. Yet this also means there are doubtless countless other people who we’ll meet in the future, and I’m excited for all of them. It’s a fantastic project to be undertaking.
There’s much more to say, but you, my readers, I’m sure have a limit of attention span — and I have much more time to talk about it all. In the mean time, I’ll leave you with this unbelievably cute little critter who we saw today when a woman brought him in on a leash to the store at the campground we paused at briefly.
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