This morning I checked out of my room, but still needed to upload this journal which seems to take forever. The wordpress setup I have on my site does not work very well with my half-baked Kindle / keyboard setup. So I end up spending hours squinting at some tiny text box where I insert my posts and pictures.

I skulked around the Packwood Inn jumping from picnic table to table leaching on their WIFI while trying to find some shade.
Finished up around 1 and had some pizza from next door. Ordered a large 3 topping. Ate that whole thing. Then headed to the grocery store next that place. That’s Packwood. IGA, Packwood Inn, Pizza place, Saloon across the street, gas station.
I need to get from Packwood back up to Kracker Barrel general store next to the trail. About a 20 minute ride on the highway.

Until today, I’ve been lucky getting rides. Not so today. I dropped my pack in front of IGA on the highway through town and started thumbing. Dozens and dozens of cars and trucks go by. Some wave at me. Why do they wave? Give me a ride asshole !

I’m joined by another hiker named Scavenger. We smile and wave in the hot sun. He’s 31 from NYC and moved to Arizona recently. Did the AT a few years ago. He’s also into bikepacking. When not backpacking he does web customization work on wordpress sites. He is a nice guy, but a little odd. He’s getting frustrated with the hitching situation and starts chatting up people unloading their shopping carts from IGA. “Hey you heading toward White Pass when your done?” Fail.

Eventually some gal pulls up in a little car and asks where we are going. She is in the area to do a few days of backpacking and didn’t think she was going that far. Drives away….then comes back and picks us up ! It took over an hour to get a hitch. Hopefully anyone reading this will think twice when they see a smelly hiker on the road. Give them a ride !

So I make it up to the General Store and reunite with Stormtrooper ! Bunch of other hikers milling around eating and drinking. The store owner ropes Scavenger and me into a little project to put together some shelves. While we are working on that Scavenger is flirting with the checker.

Storm and I decide to camp out back of the store and hit the trail tomorrow. We meet a couple of retired Marine officers and have some long chats about Afghanistan (Attrition and Prichard). Attrition’s specialty was IED discovery and disposal. He telling us all sorts of stories you don’t hear in the news. LIke the ding-dong Afghani army guys he is training. He tells me they Afghani’s get $30 for each IED they find and disarm. Well each time they bring these guys to a training range, they find out someone has planted a bunch of new IED’s around that need to be disarmed. When these guys turn in the evidence and it is scanned for biometric data, it is traced to the same students.

Some of his stories are pretty dark. Like men taking boys as their sex toys who fill that role until released. Some of these boys are trained from an early age to carry explosive vests. How the graft and corruption is so pervasive that soldiers go without pay because others above them have skimmed so much of the money the US and our allies pay to the government to fund their army. God what a mess.

While we are chatting, Scavenger comes over and sets up his tent. The store is about to close. He talks to us for a minute then disappears. We never see him come back…..he got hooked up with the cashier. Must have stayed the night at her place, heh.
Good to be hanging with Stormy again. He is full of trail stories. Love that guy.

Here is a picture of the store when we were leaving in the morning. Those picnic tables were full of hikers the day before and probably every day thereafter during the season.