Why hike?

We get a lot of questions about this trip.  Everything from the standard "how long" to "where will you sleep/shower/get food" and of course "why in the world are you doing this?"

There is no one reason for the hike.  Each of us have our own and many of them.  But in general, a few years ago we felt we needed a drastic change to the way we'd been living our lives for the previous 8 years.  Back then we were walking everyday and would go for several hours of walking on the weekends in addition to bicycling on our recumbent tandem.  For that drastic change Dave wanted to hike the Appalachian Trail.  Heather decided it would be better to bicycle across the country.  We ended up bicycling for 5 months.  Read about that here.

Years have passed and after our bike trip we made many changes.  One of which was not moving.  We had been moving every 3 to 6 months a year for almost a decade, most of that time living out of an RV while we traveled for work.  We have spent the last 5 years in one place but still living in our RV.  We are feeling a need to change again.  We started to make changes that have not come to fruition and need more time before the details would be settled.

What would we do in the meantime?  It was time to "go" again.  Heather wanted to motorcycle to Alaska.  Dave wanted to hike the Appalachian Trail.  This time we hike the Trail.

We don't consider ourselves adventure seekers.  More experience seekers.  When we bicycled we just started riding.  There was a vague idea of what we would do but mostly we just wanted to be "out there" doing "something."  This time we follow a path.  Literally.  We will walk a trail that 2 - 3 million people visit each year but less than a thousand will walk from end to end.

Read more about the Appalachian Trail at these sites:
National Parks Service
The Appalachian Trail Conservancy

For a map of the trail, click here to open a PDF, it's of the whole trail so the file is a bit large.