Day 27: field trip to rei!

Tuesday 5/15/12
Miles 342-347 (5 miles)
Elevation 3594ft

Yup, Cropdust and crew ended up going to Vegas. Lol they are so nuts!! :). I helped them make their hitchhiking sign, that's the crew pictured below. Cropdust is the girl. That woman is an animal. Yesterday she did 36 miles to get to McDonalds. Holy crap! She's also from Manning Park, so she is literally walking home. That's cool, saves on airfare. Anyhow, they must've all gotten a hitch because when I left for rei I didnt see them. Stoked!! :D

Ok so I didn't get a lot of miles in today but that's cuz I took a side trip to REI. I went with Siddartha whom I was pretty stoked to meet. There are a few people doing this trail that I was really hoping to meet, and he was one of them. We hitched to REI from McDonald's. But the cool thing was we didn't really have to hitch because we made friends and the guy offered us a ride because him and his wife were going that way anyways. Stoked!!

I got some gear upgrades at REI, special shout out to Ryan who works there, who I hope is reading this blog, thanks so much for helping me out dude! Sorry I was kind of a pain in the butt. Lol. Thru-hikers, we're so needy... :P. I swapped my heavy-ass Goal Zero solar panels for another kind that was way lighter. I got my poles retipped, and I got some of those vibram 5 finger shoes.

Then it was beer-thirty time so we went to the yardhouse. Yummy!! Omg their Mac n cheese is so good. The Yardhouse is located in a gigantic mall-type thing. It was incredibly entertaining for us to walk through with our packs on and stuff. Lol.

Esko, a trail angel in the area gave us a ride back to the trail. Thanks dude!! Trail angels are so epically awesome :)

So I didn't really get started on the trail today til almost sundown. I night hiked for a while, siddartha was a bit ahead of me the whole time. He stopped after 5 miles to make camp. I intended on trying to do about 15 miles tonight. However, he had a bottle of super yummy beer, then the wind picked up and I was cold and didn't wanna move anymore. Lol. Damn beer and my aversion to cold, it really throws a wrench in my progress. Lol. By the way, Siddartha is quite the beer connosuier! It was quite interesting listening to him go on about beer, and how he went to Belgium and other places specifically to find certain breweries. That's frickin awesome!

Anyhow, now I'm in my sleeping bag and warm and stoked, and tired!! Lol. The 5 finger shoes are pretty awesome. I'm excited to see how it'll do tomorrow when I put more than 5 miles on them. Yay!! :)