Note: All below text is as originally produced August 24th, 1996, 23 days after I got off the trail due to a broken foot. I returned to the trail September 9th, hiked to Mt. Katahdin, Maine (the northern terminus of the AT), by which time I had broken both of my feet. I decided to give my feet some time to heal up, which they have hopefully done by now. I'm probably the first thru-hiker ever to break three feet on one thru-hike!

Yep, I broke my foot, my third metatarsal. It is a stress fracture, the result of consistantly over-stressing a suceptable bone. An excellent method by which to accomplish this, I find, is to walk 800 miles.

The break occurred just out of Rockfish Gap, about three days into the Shenandoah National Park. I hiked on it all the way to Harper's Ferry, West Virginia, a distance of about 150 miles. This hurt.

So, now, I'm taking two weeks off to permit my foot to heal. At the end of that time I will visit my doctor, Dr. Moors, of Free Union, again, and he will re-evaluate the break. When he says so, and only when he says so, I will resume my hike.

I plan on continuing much farther north, perhaps as far as Massachusetts. I will hike from there to the northern terminus of the trail, Mt. Katahdin, Maine. From there I will drive down to where I had gotten back onto the trail in Massachusetts and hike south, back to Harper's Ferry. I am proceeding in this fashion to avoid running into the cold of winter, which, after this delay, would surely become a factor. I am hiking like this at the suggestion of Wingfoot, author of "The Thru-Hiker's Handbook", who once thru-hiked in the same manner.

One benefit to this is that I get to finish the trail twice. Hopefully I will be with some friends from down in Georgia for the first completion, and we can ascend Katahdin together. They will all be sad that their adventure has ended, that they must go home to their "real" lives. I, on the other hand, get to continue my hike and complete it at the capitol of the trail, Harper's Ferry. The other benefit is that I get to use this time to write and update my site, and just hang out in the grand old town of C-Ville.

Ain't life grand?

Waldo Update:

I'm still in Charlottesville. I can walk nicely now, though stairs are still uncomfortable. Today, the 24th, I got wild enough to leave the house without my Ace bandage on. I've spent all day in the office, writing to update my page entries. It looks like the updates will start off spotty, like I took a shotgun blast with pellets of days at the calendar. Give me a bit, it'll get better.

My twin brother leaves for college, Hampshire, up in Massachusetts on Tuesday. The original plan was, should I be forced to stay in town that long, I would leave with him to start again in Mass. (See plan, at bottom.) But, surely, I thought, I would be well before then! Well, that is not the case. I will be leaving within the week after he heads up to college there. My friend Amber has sweetened the concept of sticking around in town with a pair of Dave Matthews Band tickets for Nissan Pavillion for the 31st. Now I just need to work on getting backstage passes, like last DMB concert I went to.

I found this pretty darn funny. It was on some guy's web page.