Mount Shasta!

I am at mile 1510! Over half way now and only a few hundred left in Cali! I should be in Oregon in 10 days. Well, after a whirlwind trip back to Florida: 2 days of flying, 2 days of hitch-hiking, and 5 days in FL (wedding, work, baby sighting-Calina) I got back on the trail exhausted. I ended up with giardia, a parasite that lives in your intestines and causes the evacuation of everything, and had to obtain antibiotics to get rid of it (thanks JT). All better now but hiking on antibiotics was not fun. I am stepping up the mileages now to average 25 per day. The terrain has levelled out but the heat has picked up, but nothing compared to FL. I did take a short greyhound ride that was one of the worst experiences of my life. The only seat was in the rear of a packed bus. Unfortunately the bathroom door would never close, and seems to have not been cleaned in a month. The hitches were great, a farmer, construction worker, an ex-con, a not-for-profit manager, and logger. Amazingly a quarter of my hitches have been from firefighters.

Last week I had to night hike to make it to a post office in a small town called Old Station. About midnight my headlamp flashed some gold eyes, turns out it was a bear!! A few loud noises with my trekking pole scared him off. I was on my toes after that, and in the days since I have spotted 2 more. In that same town is a trail angel named Gorgi. She is an older woman who takes in hikers and cooks breakfast and dinner for them. So I stayed the night and hiked out the next morning. 5 miles later I was at a restaurant eating my second breakfast-best on the trail-breakfast burrito covered in country gravy! Another mile later I was in a cave formed by an old lava tube. In this cave the temp was 60 degrees while outside it was 100! I and another hiker spent 4 hours in there wasting the afternoon away. This cave had a parking lot for tourists, so we went to solicit a ride back to town to eat lunch! By 4 pm, and being awake since 5:30 am, we had made it 5 miles!! And been to the same town 3 times in 1 day. Sometimes you just follow your stomach.

And I wanted to thank my crew at station 1A for their warm welcome and intriguing sense of humor! One word, demented!

On that note, off to dinner for beer and burgers...

Peace!!!