District 9 was awesome

9-8-09 day 98
start: The Robinson's Farm around Front Royal, VA
end: Tom Floyd Wayside, VA
daily mileage: 2.9
total mileage: 1221.7

We woke up considerably earlier than normal with the Robinsons, who are up with the sun to milk the cows. We enjoyed some organic, healthy breakfast and said goodbye to Mr. and Mrs. Robinson as they left for the day. After lounging around for a while we decided to make it back into Front Royal.

We only planned on doing 3 miles into Tom Floyd Wayside today, so we had some time to kill in town (always a good situation!). First we went to the Post Office, where I got my new boots from Merrell! Yes! We spent some time hanging out in the local outfitter, where the super nice owner let us leave our packs for the day as we hung out around town. I got an awesome new green Oragami bowl to replace the pink Walmart one I've been toting around for a while.

We went to KFC for lunch, wandered around a few random stores (Travis got a new knife to replace the little one he lost), and went to the movie theater to check out the matinee options. But what's this? Foiled again - no movies showing before 7:30 at night. You may wish to recall that the sun is setting around 7:30 these days, so this may have discouraged a less tenacious pair of hikers... we, however, decided that we were GOING to see a movie, DARNIT, and 7:30 is NOT too late for US!

So we fooled around in an awesome used bookstore for a while (Travis bought 3 books to carry around and I got one too... and for one, glorious instant we though we'd found the entire Animorph series for just 15 bucks! We probably would have carried around 50 tiny books if it hadn't been incomplete), then went to the library to fool around on the internet for a while. We got our packs back, enjoyed some Taco Bell, and read until the movie started. It was either Inglorious Basterds or District 9 for us, and as Inglorious Basterds is super long we opted for the latter. District 9 was awesome... definitely the best movie we've seen on the trail.

We were worried about getting a hitch at 10 at night, but before we even got to the road we were going to hitch from someone pulled over and asked if he could give us a ride! We made it to the trail head and I realized half a mile down the trail that some kind of battery terminal cleaner from his trunk had gotten lodged in my pack when I threw it in there... so I accidently stole it. Oops! It didn't look too expensive at least... :-/ If it makes it better, I guess I kind of paid pennance by carrying it around in my pack for a few days. The 3 mile night hike was pretty easy though, and a fun change. We got into the shelter around 11 (super late) and tried not to wake everyone up as we went to bed.