Author Archives: Maggie Wallace

All our fretting about cold weather at the beginning felt pretty foolish today. Because the trail is commonly referred to as the Green Tunnel, a lot of people (such as us) failed to bring sunscreen.  However, despite the temperature difference (it was a balmy 75 degrees), Georgian trees are a lot like NH trees in that they lay around dormant until they feel like putting out leaves in mid May. We saw some beautiful views of the mountains today but paid the price with our tender, vitamin deprived winter hides. In camp that night we all looked like a pack […]

We now have a 30 hour bus ride from New Hampshire to Georgia ahead of us…. Hour one: on our way to Boston, the crosswords are coming along. The seat in front of Maggie just reclined…a lot. We begin to wonder if the bus trip was a huge mistake. Hour two: We retrieved our Greyhound tickets to find two extra transfers that weren’t on our original itinerary. Guess we know why they were so cheap! Hour 3 (4?): we are the only people doing a crossword puzzle on the greyhound from Boston to New York. Everyone else seems to be […]

Well, we’ve been tossing and turning at night thinking about the repercussions of having too much weight.  Certainly blisters, sore backs, and limitations on our distance are all important to factor in, but the image that keeps swimming past my eyelids at night is a grizzled old man at Neels Gap laughing at us as he manically pulls things out of our bags and ships them off to NH.  In some versions of this nightmare, he will be finding giant cans of bear mace, hunting rifles, or my mother’s china set tucked carefully away in my backpack, while Mark is […]

In New Hampshire, it is hard to get out in the winter. It is cold outside, and up in the White Mountains it is colder. If we stay around our home on the flat seacoast (yes, New Hampshire has a seacoast), hikes usually consist of the one mile that it takes to snowshoe to the bar during a particularly bad storm. However, we did manage to make it out for some notable winter hikes with some of our friends this season in preparation for the trail. You’ll notice a theme – not one of these hikes went as planned…luckily, we […]

Selecting tents allowed me to feel firsthand the way that television and Cathy comic strips inform me that women feel trying to pick out a bathing suit. Attempting to shove my 6′ 3″ frame into an ultralight tent left me feeling ashamed and wondering how anyone lives up to the unrealistic images of campers that Hollywood pushes on our society. Why does no one design tents for the full bodied man?In our local REI (if you consider an hour’s drive to be local), the average length of 2 person light-weight and ultra-light tents was about 72 inches. We tried a […]

After a plucky yet large-hearted storm visited New England last week, locals quickly realized  that the most interesting thing about them was their driveway and relayed thousands of pictures of snow drifts on the internet.  Since we are clearly not exempt, we decided to turn our photo shoot into a science experiment and actually test our stoves.  Following are the results that Mark found after I grew tired of watching pots boil and developed a short lived obsession for building snow creatures: Question: How long does it take to bring water to a boil over an alcohol stove? Variables: 1 […]

In anticipation of the AT, this week I had all four of my wisdom teeth removed. As Maggie claims an old saying goes, “It’s easier to take the ounces off yourself than your pack.” (A quick Google search suggests that this saying is neither old nor common) As long as we are coining old sayings, I’d like to add my own, “Use your dental insurance while you have it!” Regardless, now I’ll be carrying four fewer ounces to Maine.

Working a baker’s schedule leaves me with my afternoons to myself until Mark gets home at a ‘normal’ time. This time is usually perfect to read, write, work on secret hobbies Mark doesn’t know about, or exercise in eager anticipation of the coming trail. Since our deadline for departure has grown closer and the days have grown colder, however, It has become remarkably easier to justify planning in lieu of exercising. So, instead of venturing back out into the frigid cold to labor along the streets while staunch elderly New Englanders watch from behind lace curtains and curse me as […]