Jury Still Out on whether Milkshake was "$4 Good"

9-12-09 day 102
start: Hightop Hut, VA
end: Blackrock Hut, VA
daily mileage: 21.4
total mileage: 1305.9

Another exciting day in Shenandoah National Park. The terrain all through this park is rock-free with very gentle grades, so we're doing several big days in a row while it's easy. Hopefully this will give us a bit of wiggle room later on when it gets harder again south of VA. We keep track of our weekly mileages in the Companion, and we're on track to do a 131 mile week - our biggest yet! Go team!

As you may recall, dear reader, each of the shelters contains a logbook for hikers to write in and see how their friends just up the trail are doing. Sea Monster has long been drawing epic pictures in the logbook (sea monsters at first, but now just about anything sweet that comes to mind) but I've generally not been able to think of anything interesting to say, so I don't write much in the books. But no longer - I decided today to start the gimmick of writing random fun science facts in the logbooks. "Did You Know That...?"

We took a 0.6 mile side trail to get to one of the Shenandoah "Waysides," little shops that sell overpriced food. They are famous for their Blackberry milkshakes, however, so we paid $4 for a 16 oz shake. It was tasty. Maybe not $4 tasty, but tasty. Instead of backtracking we took another trail to meet up with the AT a bit further south, and probably either came out even (as if we hadn't taken the side trail) or even a bit ahead. Awesome!