Days Two and Three

Hello Family and Friends of Shawn,

I was not expecting to be able to post again so soon, but thus far on the AT Shawn has had cell phone reception. I've been able to talk to him a couple of times as a day everyday. Hopefully that will continue, but if it does not, at least we know he'll be reaching Neels Gap by Saturday night or Sunday morning/early afternoon and he will have access to a phone.

So, Shawn started out yesterday morning by making oatmeal and then hitting the trail. It was his first official day on the Appalachian Trail. He got started around 10AM. Around lunchtime, he came across a waterfall and was able to enjoy his meal in the beautiful scenery. A few hours later he came across a small path that led to a large meadow. He decided to sit there and rehydrate. After he had been there for a few minutes, he heard lots of people shouting, which isn't what one would normally expect to hear on the AT. It turns out that the meadow he had found was also the setting of an army training camp. He watched the soldiers for a couple of minutes, got to see a helicopter land on the meadow, and then went back on his way. All in all, Shawn walked about 8 miles yesterday. Around 3:30 he said that he might push on to a stream a few miles further, but because of the weather forecast (an inch of rain through the night and day) he decided to stay in his first AT shelter.

Last night he had dinner around a campfire with 5 other thru hikers. There were three men ranging between mid-twenties and early thirties (approximately) and a couple. They all talked about why they were hiking the trail and the last meal that they had before they left. Shawn was the only one who decided to stay in the shelter, until the weather got so bad that another thru hiker joined him in the middle of the night. When I talked to him at 9PM, he said he had already seen a mouse twice. He also told me about the experiences others had in that particular shelter, where one girl woke up with a mouse in her hair and another with a mouse in the bottom of the sleeping bag.

He called me this morning around 10 to say that he was up and having breakfast, but that the weather was terrible. He left around 11:30, but was only going to go 7 miles again because of the rain. He said that he would hike 14 miles tomorrow.

Those are all of the updates as of now, I'll keep you posted if I think of or hear anything else!