On, bacons, on!

Most of the trail today was in the trees.
Kind of boring, really, but easy.

August 10: Once again, Amanda would not allow me a day of rest. Before I hit the trail, however, I did some grocery shopping, setting up two 'food banks' for myself. The first to get me to Crater Lake. The second to be mailed ahead to Crater Lake. I didn't expect it to take me more than a couple of days to reach Crater Lake, so I wanted to get the package in the mail early this morning to make sure it had plenty of time to get there.

Once the necessary preparations were done, Amanda dropped me back on the trail where she picked me up the day before. Just as she was driving off, I realized that I had left my trekking pole in the car. I waved frantically trying to get her attention, but failed. No trekking pole. Certainly not the end of the world, but I felt naked without it. It was like an extension of my arm, and Amanda was driving around with my arm in the backseat.

The hike itself was pretty non-eventful. My ankle still hurt to walk on from those miserable shoes I wore two days earlier, but the pain was slowly fading. Very slowly. Most of the trail was in trees with the occasional view to lift my spirits.

Along the way, I caught up with Double D, Red Head, Zero Zero, and Fire Marshall. The only one I knew was Red Head, though apparently I had met Double D and Fire Marshall briefly way back when. Zero Zero I'd never met before--which apparently is pretty odd since I had met Fire Marshall who was helping Zero Zero on the trail. Zero Zero was blind--thus the trail name. I'd certainly heard about him! It's not often a blind person thru-hikes the Pacific Crest Trail.

Ashland should be down in the valley on the left somewhere.

I was a little curious about the guy but kept my questions to myself since I was sure he'd probably heard them all about a million times before. Most curiously, I really wanted to learn how blind was he--completely and totally blind, or a "legally blind" kind of definition? And I was curious about why he was blind. Blind from birth? Blind due to injury or sickness? I was told later that he's allegedly completely and totally blind. Maybe he had some sort of sense of light and dark--no one seemed sure about that point. But I was told that he could see about as well as someone who had no eyeballs at all. That's pretty blind, and it's rather remarkable he could do a thru-hike at all. I never did learn the cause of his blindness, though.

As it were, however, he did have help from Fire Marshall, which is why people seemed surprised that I could have crossed paths with Fire Marshall and not met Zero Zero. I'm not even sure how that happened, but our meeting was so brief, I didn't even remember him. He just "looked familiar."

A dam along the trail.

I completed another short 16-or-so mile day, arriving at a road where Amanda was waiting. She had set out a tarp with all sorts of food and drinks for thru-hikers to enjoy and was chatting with Danny. Amanda had written in chalk "I ♥ Green Tortuga" in gigantic letters on the road, which I thought was pretty amusing. She also named several hikers who had passed by while she was waiting for me, including one that asked Amanda if she was stalking Green Tortuga, after reading the message scribbled in chalk on the road.

That I found especially funny, and said I'd be telling people all over the trail that I had a stalker. Or, if any hikers asked me about the message, I could blame it on another hiker. "Yeah, that Charmin. It was HER! She's obsessed!" Amanda, in fact, was inspired to write the message after I had told her about all the notes Charmin had left Hasty on the trail. She wanted to leave me "notes" on the trail as well. =)

Just as an aside, later, near the end of the trail, I was eating dinner with a few other hikers including Danny in Washington at a trail town when Neon asked about the the chalk messages. I turned to Danny and said, "I told you to stop doing that!" It was pretty darned funny. =)

But I digress.... that was later. Back to the present. At least the present as far as this blog is concerned.....

Nevermind the arrow--that was spray painted on the road
marking the trail. Amanda wrote the rest of that in chalk, though.

Amanda and I left four cold sodas on the trail for the four hikers we knew were behind. They hadn't arrived by the time we left, but we didn't want to leave them completely empty-handed, so we left the four sodas on the trail at the trailhead. It would be impossible to miss. Well, except for Zero Zero. He might not have seen them, but we had every confidence that the others he was hiking with would tell him.

Then we drove back to Ashland where I changed clothes so we could attend a Shakespearean play. Ashland, of course, is famous for the Shakespeare Festival, and for all of the times Amanda and I had been through the town, never once had we managed to stop long enough to enjoy one of the plays the town is so famous for. Tonight, that would change!

On the menu was Henry IV, Part I--a history and one I was quite familiar with from my Shakespeare class in college. We listened to some live music while waiting for the doors to open, which I enjoyed. It seems they bring people in just about every evening for free entertainment, and this evening was a symphony of high school students. At least they looked like they could have been high school students.

The doors finally opened and we took our seats. I took a couple of photos, then Amanda took a photo using her flash and getting us BUSTED by an usher. Apparently, photography of any sort was not tolerated. This surprised us--even before the show started? That's just stupid. I could understand not allowing flash photography during the show, but people were just coming into the theater and finding their seats.

The last photo I took--before Amanda got us
BUSTED by the Camera Nazi.

Properly chastised, we sat around, watching everyone else taking their seats. I think we had the camera Nazi usher in our section, though, since I saw many other people taking photos in other parts of the theater but nobody ever busted them for it. We saw our lady bust several others, however. Seemed very unfair. Why were there no signs warning people not to take photos? I was very annoyed, but at least I got a couple of photos (not using a flash) before Amanda attracted the camera Nazi by taking a photo with a flash.

The show was a lot of fun to watch. Falstaff in particular was hilariously funny, but I won't get into the details of the play. If you want to know how it turns out, you can read the entire play yourself. (The title of this post--On, bacons, on!--is a quote from Falstaff from this play.)

The show ended well past my bedtime, so after the show finished, we went back to our motel and went to sleep.