Day 70: Out of the Shenandoahs!

May 16: I got another early start to the day’s hike, partly due to the fact that rain was expected later that afternoon. No sense getting a late start and getting caught in rain!

Amanda dropped me off at Compton Gap which left me a short 5.6 miles to US 522, where the trail crossed the road a few miles from Front Royal. The hike was uneventful, but when I arrived at the highway, Amanda was nowhere to be seen. She showed up about 20 minutes late explaining that she had driven to Winchester to go to a Fed-Ex office which hadn’t opened as early as she expected. No big deal, although I was a little disappointed to have missed Winchester myself. Maybe next time!



We ate lunch at a diner, and later ate dinner at a luner. (That’s a joke. Please don’t tell me that there’s no such thing as a luner!) We did really eat lunch at a diner, but we ate dinner at a soul food restaurant downtown. Getting downtown turned out to be more difficult than we expected because there was a wine festival going on that closed down all sorts of roads and left piles of people—many clearly inebriated—littering the streets. But it didn’t stop us from finding a place for dinner!

By the time we got back to the hotel again, the skies opened up with buckets of rain. Definitely not a good time to be on the trail! =)

Outside of leaving the hotel for food, though, I stayed indoors just working on blog entries. I needed to get a bunch of these suckers done!