Day 89, 90, 91: Virginia blues, Pennsylvania bruises.

Day 89:

Last year when I was following other thruhiker's blogs and journals and videos, I noticed something, an unexplained lull in information between Virginia and New England. I now know why.

If I were to legitimately describe our day, it would go as such:

We walked on a trail. It was mostly covered in rocks. It hurt our feet. Then we stopped to eat. Then walked. Then stopped to camp.

Fin.

Day 90:

Giardia and the antibiotics I used to kill it have left my bowels inflamed and depopulated of good bacteria. My digestion is awful and it takes a crazy amount of food to give me any energy due to malabsorption. But I can't eat just any food, sugar inflames my intestines and leads to other shitty problems (pun intended). Unfortunately for me, I've been supplementing my caloric intake with what I call "trash food". 

This is what you think it means.

Not surprisingly, the trash food leads to ever more shitty problems, and I fear that my intestinal health is at an all time low with no hope of recovery until after this hike is done.

Enter: probiotics. The foot soldiers of gut health. The only thing keeping me in the good fight and on the trail doing miles.

But enough about my intestines, I feel like all I ever talk about these days is the well being (or lack thereof) of my colon.

The trail, albeit rocky, is not as monotonous and the trail magic is plentiful.

Later in the day we would meet this fellow:

His name is Kurtis, he's an Emmy nominated video producer. He (his company) was contracted out to do a video series about the AT in Pennsylvania. He spent the evening (and the morning) following us on the trail, up a thousand foot climb that's more graffitied boulder field than trail, and down a deforested ridge (due to a century of zinc mining), and filmed us all the while.

Anyhow, he's a super cool duder with a crazy interesting life story, and if you want to see what he's been up to then check out his site: www.kurtisfilms.com

I'm sure at some point I'll have access to at least some of the videos he took of us, which I'll post for our mutual enjoyment and my not so mutual embarrassment.

Day 91: 

Much the same, except on this day, the mosquitos are out in such force that they're literally exploding against my pack, staining the white cuben fiber with little splotches of blood red. 

It's gross and I hate it and is only a little bit worse than the fact that they've completely eaten all of my exposed skin.

Regardless, the pull of Katahdin leads us ever onward, the only quality besides blatant masochism, that we share with all other thruhikers. 

We're getting closer every day.