I have some news to share. I won’t say it is “exciting” news, because that feels presumptuous. The news is that I have bought a domain for this blog. The blog can now be found at this new URL: https://www.genehikesapptrail.blog
The biggest change you will notice, aside from the location, is that there are no more ads to sift through. That was not the main reason I decided to pony up cash, but it is the one most noticeable to you the readers.
The impetus behind this change was because of storage. A free plan got you 1GB of storage, but the cheapest paid plan is 6GB. The lack of storage for a free blog meant that I have been compressing almost every image I have uploaded. I do not wish to spend time compressing anything before uploading while I’m on the trail, so I needed to pay for more storage space. As someone who used Lynx text-only browser in the ’90s, I never dreamed I would ever say 1GB of storage was too little.
Since the paid plan is good for one year, this purchase should last until the thru-hike is over. I’ll probably continue compressing files until the actual hike begins, but once it does I will be uploading everything in source quality. I want you to be able to experience the awe and wonders of the trail just as I will.
To celebrate this announcement, we are doing our first and only Content Week[TM]. Starting on Wednesday, September 23rd, I will be posting a new article every day for one whole week. I am heavily biased, but I feel like I have a good crop of fresh posts to keep you entertained for the entire week.
Speaking of September 23, the annual AT hangtag color vote is going on right now. It ends on the 23rd, so if you are planning on doing a thru-hike next year, make sure you get your votes in. You can vote once per day.
I have another announcement that I’ll shoehorn in here as well. There is about to be a tonal shift in this blog. For the past six months I have been blogging about getting ready for the Appalachian Trail. However, it has not felt much different from a fitness blog or a weight loss blog. Lots of hiking day trips and silly things that may have crossed my mind, but not a ton of real content about things important to thru-hiking specifically. Moving forward, while I do want to continue doing hikes and fitness stuff, I want to start focusing in on the nitty gritty of what next year entails.
Expect more gear reviews, planning tips, and overnight trips. Since it is finally under 100 degrees every day and the six month long Austin summer is winding down, I hope to bivouac at McKinney Falls and Bastrop State Park at a minimum during the fall. Those should be great occasions to stress test my gear and figure out which items are worth it and which ones need to be replaced before March. Those are the kind of things I expect to discuss way more over the next six months.
September 4, 2006 was twenty years ago today. I celebrate that day each year because it is the day I quit smoking. Or, more accurately, it is the most recent day I quit smoking and the first time I did not start smoking again within a few months. I treat this date as though it is another birthday because quitting smoking gave me a new lease on life. And I didn’t even need to do a credit check and put down a security deposit for this one.
I started smoking fairly late for someone who grew up in the rural south. I never smoked in high school despite my dad smoking over a pack a day for my entire life. Some of my earliest memories of my dad are of me sitting on the floor playing with toy cars while he filled the entire room with smoke that I imagined was the cool fog my mini racers were navigating on their obstacle course that included our coffee table and the legs of his chair. I never took up smoking until late in college, but I quickly made up for lost time. Smoking is one of those things you understand is disgusting and bad for you the entire time you participate, but because it is an addictive drug you are powerless to do anything about it.
Marlboro Reds were my cigarette of choice. I loved Reds more than baseball fans in Cincinnati. Every time I smoked a cig that wasn’t a Red, I would think of how much better a Red would be. I was able to keep my habit down at about a half pack a day for the decade or so that I smoked. I tried to quit many times. Or, to be more accurate, I actually did quit many times. I just started back up again after a few weeks or months.
I remember when Boston outlawed smoking in bars back in 2003. I was certain that was going to be the tipping point and I could easily quit if the bars were off limits. Fast forward to me standing around in the freezing cold outside of the Druid in Inman Square taking drags and shivering my ass off.
I kept trying to quit many other times. Being in the Army sabotaged my attempts as much as anything else. I got to the point that I could quit for the entire month, but come drill weekend I just had to get a pack to smoke in order to make it through the day. One pack to survive the weekend would become a few packs to survive the entire week of, which eventually just became me starting to smoke all over again.
I know now that my whole problem was that I never really wanted to quit for me. I wanted to quit because cigarettes cost a lot of money. Or I wanted to quit because society told me I should quit. Those were external motivations, and they just weren’t good enough for me. I never actually wanted to try and quit purely for myself until I realized just how destructive it was for my own life.
Ben Affleck puts it very well in an interview with Howard Stern. Here, he talks about how he was not able to quit drinking until it all but ruined his life. “The cure for addiction,” as he states, “is suffering.”
In summer 2006 my Reserve unit went to Fort McCoy in Wisconsin for Annual Training. We were there for an exercise with many other Chemical units around the country. On the way there I bought two cartons of Reds, expecting them to last the entire two week trip and beyond. I was wrong.
I’m not sure what was different about this AT that made me smoke so much more than usual. Yes, it was hard, but AT was always hard. There was a lot of “hurry up and wait”, but that was also nothing extraordinary. Whatever it was, all I did was smoke and smoke and smoke. In two weeks, I smoked both cartons. A carton is ten packs of cigarettes, each pack containing twenty cigarettes. And yes, I did lend lots of smokes to people, but I also bummed at least as many from others.
Basically I smoked a pack and a half each day. An explosive increase from half a pack a day. Once I got home I knew there had to be a major change. I did not want this to be my new normal. I did not want to get cancer before 40. I did not want to have trouble climbing two flights of stairs.
The first thing I did was set a date. I chose Labor Day because it was the end of a long weekend. I spent the weekend smoking more than normal, hoping it would cause me not to miss smoking for the first couple of days. On Labor Day itself I went to Olde Country Buffet and got a gluttinous meal of meat loaf, more meat loaf, fried chicken, red velvet cake; all the normal stuff you get at Olde Country Buffet. A few alcoholic beverages were consumed as well. I did my best to make the entire weekend feel like a bacchanalia of vices.
For the most part it worked. I spent most of the following week just recovering from all the overindulging. Probably the hardest part was not getting three or four ten-minute smoke breaks at work. I never missed cigarettes until the next weekend. By then I could tell myself “you’ve already made it four days, keep going”.
Because I had so much resolve this time, it continued to go smoothly. My first drill after quitting was tough, just because when I told people I quit they didn’t believe me. So they spent the whole weekend trying to shove lit cigs into my mouth. Other than that, I would occasionally see someone smoking and get an overwhelming feeling of envy. It felt like an itch on my heart. I just desperately wanted to steal that person’s cigarette and smoke it for myself. This happened every few days initially, then slowly got progressively further spaced out. Even now I still get that feeling once every 9 months or so.
The biggest downside was weight gain. There is a reason every thin, beautiful, eastern European supermodel smokes like a chimney. I slowly put on pound after pound despite doing and eating exactly what I did before. That frustrated the shit out of me, because I was supposedly getting healthier as I watched my pants get tighter and tighter. I put on about 12 pounds before I finally got a handle on it around Thanksgiving, then I needed a few months to lose it all back.
The second biggest downside was that I picked up spitting outdoors. Like, all the time outdoors. I had developed an oral fixation with the cue that being outside meant my mouth needed to be busy. When I stopped smoking I started spitting all the time, but only outside. It’s pretty fucking disgusting but I have no idea how to stop doing it without smoking again.
The positives are great. I save tons of money that I used to spend on cigarettes. My health and endurance are as good as I could hope. It has truly been a complete life transformation, and that is why I treat it as a second birthday.
Of course, having a birthday on 9/4/06 means I share a birthday with the Queen Bey herself. For my 20th birthday and her 45th, we need to have a dance party celebration!
In chapter 11 of the Book of Judges we are introduced to Jephthah. He is the bastard son of Gilead and gets forced into exile because his legitimate brothers will not share their inheritance with him. While in exile, he is exhorted to lead Israel’s armies against the Ammonites.
Before the fateful battle, Jephthah prays to God for assistance. In return he vows to make a burnt offering of the first person to emerge from his house. God delivers a victory for Israel and when Jephthah returns home his only daughter is the first person that comes out to meet him. Awkward. Being a man of his word, he made an offering out of her.
In the twelfth chapter, the Ephramites threaten to burn Jephthah’s house down. Not because he killed his daughter, but because he fought the Ammonites without asking their help first. Jephthah goes to war with the Ephramites and routs them. As the Ephramites attempt to flee over the river, the Gileadites make everyone who tries to cross pronounce the word “shibboleth”. Because of linguistic differences, Ephramites pronounced the word as “sibboleth” making it easy to know which ones to allow to cross the river and which ones to kill. 42000 Ephramites died, so the method was coldly efficient.
Anyway, that story is where we get the word “shibboleth” which is any word or phrase that can be used to distinguish between in-groups and out-groups. One common shibboleth is in the way place names are pronounced. People local to an area will know the pronunciations, but tourists or recent arrivals will get tripped up and mark themselves as part of the out-group.
Living in Las Vegas, the most common shibboleth was the pronunciation of the state name. Locals would say it correctly as “ne-VADD-uh”. People whose sole purpose in life was to crawl into casinos and empty their wallets so we could avoid paying state income taxes would pronounce it “ne-VODD-uh” or some other appalling way.
Massachusetts was full of geographical shibboleths. This happens when the place names are a melange of American English, British English, and Native American words. Then each word gets filtered through a heavy Bawstin accent. This is how you wind up with Worcester pronounced “WOO-stah” or Cochituate as “co-KIT-chew-it”.
Like those states, Texas also has shibboleths. I dare anyone to say Pedernales correctly the first time you see it. One big one in Austin guaranteed to trip you up within your first month of moving here is Manor. Pronounced “MAY-ner”. Manor is a suburb east of Austin where a host of commuters live.
Okay, I’m going somewhere with this meandering introduction. Manor is important to this post because there is an Austin To Manor bike trail that runs five miles and terminates at Johnny Morris Road in east Austin. Just on the other side of the street from the end of that trail is the northern end of the Southern Walnut Creek Trail. I did the Northern Walnut Creek Trail earlier this spring, so it was only a matter of time before I grabbed the 25 pound backpack and attacked this one too.
First things first, this trail was very wide and well kept. It definitely functions chiefly as a bike trail with hiking being a second priority. The entire thing was paved with almost no potholes or visible cracks or anything. Every section had lots of signs about upcoming curves and reminders to slow down in hilly sections. I enjoyed it as a hiker, but I feel like if I was a biker this would be my favorite trail by a wide margin. Oh, and there were lots of trees and shade. This was great because Austin is currently in the grips of a seemingly never ending run of consecutive 100 degree days in August.
Second thing second, you’ll notice that the sign is showing the miles to the end of the trail instead of beginning at mile zero. Mile zero is on the southern end closer to downtown. I started on my less preferred end for two significant reasons.
One, the northern end is difficult as fuck to get to using public transit. I had to take two buses and then hoof it almost two miles to reach the start point. Conversely, the opposite end was only about a quarter mile from a bus stop. I figured it would be better to inconvenience myself at the beginning of the day before it got too hot than to walk the entire trail and then have an hour of walking to look forward to.
Two, doing it this way allowed me to go somewhere exciting close to the mile zero marker. Sort of like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. I’ll leave exactly what that place was until the end of this post.
One of the more interesting sights along the first couple of miles was this painted bench.
I’d like to say, for the record, that whoever painted this bench never saw my face. If they had they would never say it was better than any view. In all fairness though, I guess I need to share the view from this bench before I can say it is definitely better than my visage.
You can make out a faint view of downtown beyond the green trees. If you can get past the mountain of tall, brown, dead and dying grass. In addition to being 100 degrees every day in August, water has been in short supply. The airport has seen a grand total of 0.02 inches of rain this month. Most every living thing in town is either slowly dying outside or complaining inside in their underwear sitting next to the air conditioner.
The trail meanders along for a few miles and then runs along beside Harvey Penick Golf Campus. In addition to a nine hole golf course, they also host a footgolf course. Footgolf is pretty much what you think it is. You kick a soccer ball around a golf course until you kick it into an oversized hole. Fewest kicks wins.
At least you could see some green grass on the golf course. Check out this bridge over Walnut Creek that showed how low the water level was.
Not to belabor the dryness in Texas right now, but I’m going to do just that. The Ross fire continues to rage west of the Metroplex. Honestly, as bad as conditions are it could have happened anywhere in the Lone Star State. I passed a “wildflower meadow” in name only.
If nature’s first green is gold, then her last green is brown. With apologies to Robert Frost, I’d like to wax poetic about summertime in Austin.
Nature’s last green is brown, once you notice it gets you down.
As temperatures climb ever higher, everything might catch fire.
This recap might make it seem like I was depressed the entire trip, but that would be far from the case. Truth is, Austin always gets hot and dry in the summer. It’s not as bad as Lake Powell or anything, so we’ll be just fine. Fingers crossed.
Nothing much eventful happened until I reached the southern end of the trail at Govalle (pronounced “go-VAL-ee”) Neighborhood Park. Remember when I said earlier that this trail catered to bike riders? Once I got to Govalle Park I realized that there were no bathrooms or water fountains anywhere along the main trail. Fortunately the park had nice restrooms and water fountains with faucets for filling water bottles.
I took a few other pictures at Govalle Park, so I might as well show them off here.
After milling around in the park for a while, it was time to go check out that sweet mile zero marker and bring this hike to an end.
But, of course, this was not really the conclusion because I promised a pot of gold at the end of this rainbow. I walked about half a mile down Shady Lane from the park and found my destination, Hi Sign Brewing.
I had to try their Millie Brown Ale, an American brown, and got a cool cup of delicious ice water to stay hydrated.
Both beers were refreshing but, truth be told, the service was less than desirable. Despite being one of only two people at the bar I had to stare daggers into the bartender before she would stop doomscrolling and come over and assist me. I get it, I’m hideously ugly. But does that mean I’m not entitled to good service? I am not an animal!
After the second beer it really was time for my journey to end. I don’t really have a closing statement here, so that’s it. Drive home safe.
There have been a rare few discoveries since the dawn of time that were seminal in the course of history. You can draw a thick black line and divide all events into “before this” and “since this”. I’m talking, like, the invention of agriculture. The introduction of cavalry in warfighting. The creation of the printing press. And, if you are over the age of 40, you have to include the discovery of ibuprofen.
Being over 40 means spending each day simply trying to manage the aches and pains and humiliations of just trying to get by in life. Putting on socks is legitimately the most difficult thing I do eight out of ten days. Everything is so hard and hurts so much. I don’t know how anyone in olden times did it without taking two ibuprofen in the morning, and sometimes two more in the afternoon. Hikers also don’t need to be told about the virtues of ibuprofen. Its nom de guerre on various trails is Vitamin I.
In salute to this miracle drug, I thought it would be cool to regale you with twelve facts about ibuprofen you never knew. Unless you are a chemist or pharmacologist, in which case you definitely know these.
Gene Hikes the Appalachian Trail 