Legs and Borders

"If bobcats can live in Iowa, they can live anywhere. Iowa is like a ecological desert". Shower Shakedown. Today can be described by one word: SNAKES! The begging of the day was pretty standard, Big Owl decided to wrap up her camp early as she was low on water and next stream was 10 miles away uphill, so she made a lot of noise in the darkness around 4am waking me up in the process. I didn't mind it as I done the very same thing to other people before. I actually managed to fall asleep when she left and started to pack up around 5:30am. Next section was not only uphill but also with a lot of old, burned trees that fell on the trail, I had to manoeuvre around them to get through. Few hours later and after getting past the 600 miles marker I was at the water source, Big Owl was there with few other hikers. I topped up my bottles, had a cinnamon pop tart, a 'fun size snickers' and went on to the next water point (the joys of walking through the desert). At this sourc...

"When I was hiking AT in 2015, I got my legs after a month." Wall-E "We were walking one day and we can hear rattling, it was afternoon so we though it was cicadas, then we turned around the corner.. and it definitely wasn't cicadas." The Dude and Bugs. It was a long and unexpectedly interesting day. We woke up in the morning after a night full of noises ranging from neighbours shouting above us, to train horns and helicopters. Tom wanted to get McDonalds in the morning, I wasn't that hungry since I finished eating yesterday's pizza (microwave even had a pizza setting!) but I wouldn't say no to a coffee. We set off from the room at 6:45 and headed towards nearby McDs but unfortunately it was closed, so we went to a Starbucks instead. Uber driver picked us up half an hour later and by 8am we were back on the trail. I didn't have the best start, my shins were a bit sore from the four mile push through the windy desert last evening, so I said to Tom...