{"id":649,"date":"2012-05-23T18:04:58","date_gmt":"2012-05-23T22:04:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.greatdivideride.com\/?p=649"},"modified":"2024-03-31T16:18:02","modified_gmt":"2024-03-31T22:18:02","slug":"trail-days","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.greatdivideride.com\/unicycle\/2012\/05\/23\/trail-days\/","title":{"rendered":"Trail Days"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week I packed up the car and headed to southwest Virginia for Trail Days<\/a>, a festival in celebration of the Appalachian Trail (AT) and outdoor adventure. YAMA<\/a>, my business, purchased vendor space to promote the Great Divide Ride and to showcase some products. I had a blast meeting everybody, but by the end, my brain had just about shut down from all the excitement. To recuperate, I headed off to the nearby Mt. Rogers to visit the ponies and Longhorns.<\/p>\n

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The weekend started off on Thursday for me. I packed up the car, somehow managing to squish everything into my little Civic. As I passed over Afton Mtn, I made my routine drive-by of the AT to see if I could find any hikers to bring to Trail Days. I found two thu-hikers, Two-Percent and Smokey, who I smushed into the car and drove to town (couldn’t convince them to go all the way to Trail Days). Poor guys will probably have a crick in necks for the rest of their hikes.<\/p>\n

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I arrived in the little town of Damascus in the afternoon and promptly located my vendor space to begin setting up. I hadn’t had the time to stage everything beforehand, but other than a little head scratching, everything went pretty smoothly. That was quite a nice surprise for me after a week of frantic scrambling to get everything ready. It ended up raining most of the evening so I hung out under the tent with my new friends and neighbors from Enertia Trail Foods<\/a> and Power Peg<\/a>. Enertia treated us to some amazing gorp and also unloaded something like 50 lbs of dehydrated veggies on me – thanks Enertia! I’d been looking for some good dehydrated veggies for the meals I’ll put together for this trip – problem solved (now I have the problem of how to use it all).<\/p>\n

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Friday was the real start of Trail Days, when most of the hikers, past and present, began to show up. It was a full day of chatting with people and it went by fast; I had a fabulous time meeting everyone and talking about my gear and the unicycle. The big fat wheel on my mountain unicycle (MUni) sure turns heads. In the evening I went back to my tent to change into some warmer clothes and emerged to find the police approaching. As I stepped out, an officer asked, “What’ya doing in there?” to which I answered “um\u2026 changing into warmer clothes?” He started poking around in my tent as a fragrance wafted out of the woods so I said, “It ain’t coming from in there.” “No, you’re right, it’s not” he replied, sounding disgruntled.<\/p>\n

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Perhaps the most memorable part of the Trail Days weekend is the traditional ‘Hiker Parade’ on Saturday. All the hikers gather and march through town in what becomes a huge, town-wide water fight between the hikers and townspeople. They usually have more ammunition, but us hikers outnumber them in troops. Just watch the video below (more on my youtube channel<\/a>):<\/p>\n

Other highlights from the weekend were meeting the folks over at Primal Spirit Foods<\/a> who gave me a box of their vegan beef jerky for the trip – thanks! This stuff is really good; not sure if I’m going to have the self control to actually save it for the trip, plus I want to give friends samples to show them how good it is. I also left with several pairs of cushy socks from my other neighbor, Thorlo<\/a> – thank you, thank you!<\/p>\n

Sunday winds down pretty quickly among the hiker crowd, but still draws a lot of locals and regionals. Around 2:30 I think I started packing up and about at the same time realized that at some point my brain had stopped functioning. It was quite the challenge to cram everything back in the car, especially with the 950 packets of dehydrated veggies that I acquired. To recuperate, I decided to take an impromptu trip for the night, and headed off to the nearby Grayson Highlands and Mt. Rogers, one of my favorite areas.<\/p>\n

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The trip to the Highlands was a perfect end to Trail Days. I broke into a pair of my new Thorlo socks and headed off to my favorite campsite. I enjoyed a dinner from Enertia while watching a herd of ponies stampede in the distance as the sun set. As it grew dark, I made a small fire, poured some wine into my cookpot, and opened my guide books to look over trip logistics for the unicycle ride. With just over three weeks left before I leave for Banff I’m running quite a bit behind in both planning and training for the ride. I’ve been telling people that I WAS panicking, and am NOW freaking out. Too much to do. I just want to go. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

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Last week I packed up the car and headed to southwest Virginia for Trail Days, a festival in celebration of the Appalachian Trail (AT) and outdoor adventure. YAMA, my business, purchased vendor space to promote the Great Divide Ride and to showcase some products. I had a blast meeting everybody, but by the end, my […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"site-container-style":"default","site-container-layout":"default","site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-transparent-header":"default","disable-article-header":"default","disable-site-header":"default","disable-site-footer":"default","disable-content-area-spacing":"default","_themeisle_gutenberg_block_has_review":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-649","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-prep"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdivideride.com\/unicycle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/649","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdivideride.com\/unicycle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdivideride.com\/unicycle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdivideride.com\/unicycle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdivideride.com\/unicycle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=649"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdivideride.com\/unicycle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/649\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1475,"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdivideride.com\/unicycle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/649\/revisions\/1475"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdivideride.com\/unicycle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=649"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdivideride.com\/unicycle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=649"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdivideride.com\/unicycle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=649"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}