Miles hiked: zero
Mile marker: 454.7
The showers don’t open until 6:30 AM. It’s not even 6:00 yet, so I roll around on my half-deflated air mattress until I decide I can no longer be a rotisserie chicken. My portable charger needs to be charged anyway, so I’ll just work on my blogs while I wait for the showers to open up.
It looks like I’m not the first one awake. The gutelele play — which is a little guitar — who was smoking a cigarette in the middle of the road the other day is waiting for the showers. He’s a soft-spoken British guy from Canterbury, and he’s currently stepping from side to side next to the closet-sized shower.
“It seems as if they’ve turned the controls off,” he says.
“They don’t open until 6:30,” I say.
We chat for a bit while we wait for 6:30 to hit. I was hoping to work on my blog, but it looks like the queue for the shower begins earlier than I thought.
The brown bunny rabbits hop around on the dusty slope behind the showers.
I wish I’d taken a shower last night. My hands are still dirty from where I couldn’t rub the black off by my thumbs, my toes are filthy, and I couldn’t get the dirt off around the scab on the back of my ankle.
By the time it’s almost 6:30, Lucie, Rafiki, Savannah, and Bumper are all in line behind me.
Lots of smelly people.
I’m about to grab a coffee from the coffee pot in the store — Farmer John does a Walmart order everyday and sells the items — this is free coffee, by the way. The door opens to the shower and I rush over to get inside.
The water handle looks like the same thing you’d use to turn a hose on. Wow, this is hot! Really hot!
I spend five minutes trying to adjust the water temperature. It feels nice to get all the dirt, salt, and sunscreen off of me. I use my bandana in place of a washcloth, since there are none available. When I wash my feet, brown water swirls on the ground.
Wow. I am very dirty.
It takes a while, too. Getting this dirt off is no joke. I also learn that bandanas are quite soft. Washcloths have much more abrasion.
I step out, all clean and smelling like men’s soap, and grab a coffee in a little paper cup. I load it up with powder milk and sugar.
We do the laundry, which involves rinsing out my socks from a hose behind the shower, and wait around for it to finish in the machines.
Dad sits in a chair by his tent. I join him in the poolside lounge chair and he offers me his sleeping bag. It’s a bit cloudy, so it’s making for a chilly morning. I’m wearing some loaner clothes from the laundry room.
Bumper and I head to the local coffee shop. I’m starving by this point, since I didn’t eat breakfast. I order a chicken avocado sandwich and an extra sweet caramel macchiato. My sandwich was bland and the macchiato not sweet except for the caramel drizzle. Oh well.
California does not meet culinary expectations once again.
We spend the next few hours blogging and vlogging. Our hiker friends join us, including Truls! I pay him for the box he shipped out to us. He’ll be continuing hiking today!
We were going to go to the burger place for dinner, but they close at 3:00. Dad meets me there for lunch instead. I eat the hikers burger, which is pretty good! We get a 20% discount too. I did tell Rafiki to go ahead and eat lunch, so he’s a little unhappy that he missed the burger opportunity.
We should have looked at the hours, I guess.
We go to resupply at the market. There aren’t a ton of good options, but at least Farmer John has more items than the market.
We return back to Serenity Oasis — the ‘hiker only’ campground, and put together our food bags after a quick shop at their little market. Plus, Lucie gives me two melted snickers bars! Score! Although, I’m not sure how edible it will be by the time I get to it.
My food bag weighs in at a grueling 13 lbs.
Two pounds a day is the goal. I’m over by three pounds. Darn honey buns.
Rafiki and Savannah walk off with foot baths.
Not a bad idea.
I shoot my mom a detailed texted about a box I need for when I get to Kennedy Meadows. I need a box for the hike from there to Bishop. It’s a six day carry and I will need my rain pants. Hopefully the mosquitos won’t be bad, but every PCT hiker hits the mosquitos at some point.
When Rafiki and Savannah finish their spa time, I snag their foot baths and wrap the liner around it. I fill it with hot water and fill it with epsom salts that are packaged into ziplock bags.
Lucie joins me. It’s so hot to the touch that my foot burns! I wait a moment then immerse both of my feet. Ouch, this is hot!
Not ten minutes later and the water is luke warm.
Unfortunately, I missed a text earlier from Rafiki asking me to buy hotdogs. So we go to a Mexican restaurant where I eat the worst nachos of my life. Two other hikers said they were good! Lucie, Savannah, and I all got the nachos! There was some type of green gravy under it. Such a bad purchase. Rafiki is on his third quesadilla since we got to Agua Dulce. We’ll see how that sits with his stomach.
Lucie, Dad, Savannah, and I are deep in conversation. We talk about how lucky we are to be on trail. We talk about how we’re wanting to figure life out a bit. How we regret certain choices in life. How generations have changed from our grandparents to us.
I grab a snickers ice cream bar from the store — meaning Rafiki bought it for me since I bought his toothpaste earlier — and head back to camp.
I finally, I wipe down the back of my shoe with alcohol and put some tenacious tape over it. The tape on my left foot doesn’t stick so well, so I glue it with some New Skin.
I take a hot shower, since it’s included with my stay, and use Rafiki’s lotion for my face. The hot water sucked all of the moisture right out of my skin.
Rafiki and I sit and chat while the rest of the group giggle together with a new addition to the group, Socks, surrounding Rafiki’s ‘domicile,’ as he calls it.
“You forgot a stake,” someone tells Rafiki.
“I know, I can’t get it out of the ground,” Rafiki says. The ground is very, very hard. He ruined some of his stakes yesterday trying to hammer them into the hard-pact sand.
Savannah walks up to the stake, finds the string next to it, and wraps the string around the stake. She pulls. It’s slides out of the ground like a hot knife through butter.
Everyone dies laughing. That took Savannah two seconds when Rafiki couldn’t get it out no matter how hard he tried!
I crawl into my tent. My things are exploded everywhere, but I’m too tired to try to organize it. We’ve got another long day tomorrow! At least, as with any good day, it will start with a cup of hot coffee.
Until tomorrow, friends! Sleep tight!
The Wonderland Journal 
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