Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Unexpected zero at Kincora

10-16-09 day 136
start: Kincora Hostel in Dennis Cove, TN
end: Kincora Hostel in Dennis Cove, TN
daily mileage: 0
total mileage: 1765.7

We woke up to more horrible weather, and cooked up the delicious breakfast that we'd bought yesterday at the grocery in the hostel's kitchen. Supplemented, of course, by all the fantastic foods that the U.T. students had left for us the night before! We ate our delicious breakfast, and spent a good, long time looking out the windows at the cold, nasty rain out there. Neither of us wanted to hike in it... but we had to get to Springer at some point, and we'd just zeroed (several times) recently. I was for hiking on, but it became increasingly clear that Sea Monster didn't want to. But I really do think we would have hiked on except for the fact that the girls (and boys, I guess) of UT were supposedly coming back for a little bit that night. Having had such a good time hanging out with them the night before, we decided not to let hiking get in the way of our trail experience and stay for the day.

We found this zero to be somewhat like our other recent one in Damascus. We had no internet (so no blog updating) and no cell service, so we just hung out and read and chatted, staying out of the bad weather. It was nice. The other guys went into town to get more spaghetti supplies for dinner, and Fiddler showed up as well. So it was now Sea Monster, Buffalo, No Money, Root Beer Float, Icarus, and me. We got some bad news when we found out that the UT students weren't coming back, but made the best of it by launching into a post-dinner game of Risk between me, Sea Monster, Fiddler, and Root Beer Float. It ran pretty late, and we ended up calling it a draw. This happened around 11 pm.

I then launched into one of my admittedly nerdier endeavors. I decided it was high time someone figured out the probability of a victory, given X men on an attacking country and Y on a defending. This turns out to be really hard. You have to account for the 3 dice rolled by the attacker (with the lowest one not counting), then comparing the rolls with the tie going to the defender... anyway, I was up until 3:45 figuring it out, but I'll be damned if I didn't! So I am now a formidable Risk foe, with the power of math at my side! While I was figuring this out, some section hikers called around midnight to get directions into the hostel... Sea Monster guided them in. They were really lucky we were up that late.

3 comments:

  1. Sorry we didn't make it back to the hostel that night dudes. We ended up going over to Boone, NC to stay at a church and work at a wildlife refuge. Glad the food treated you well. I just sent all the people from the trip a link to the page, so you may or may not get some comments in the next day or so. Regardless I'm sure you'll get some traffic. Good luck finishing the trail.

    Zac

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  2. I wish we had been able to make it back that second night. The risk probability made me laugh, only because I, myself, have done things of that nature many times. There is a reason I am studying statistics.
    Great to meet you!
    Chelsea--or Christine, whichever you prefer.

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  3. I'm very sorry we didn't get to come back that night! It was great meeting you guys and I think you inspired many of us to either hike the AT at some point, or to grow a beard. Good luck on the rest of your journey!!

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