Dear Friends and Family,

We are now officially going coast-to-coast!!

Unlike my 2023 road trip, there is nothing much I really want to see on the East Coast of this country. I’ve been up and down Delmarva and the Outer Banks several times in my life and there aren’t many Appalachian hikes I want to do that are too far outside of weekend tripping range. And despite starting this trip close to 3 weeks earlier than the last one, I have so much planned to see in the west of this country that I don’t want to spend much time seeing things I could otherwise see in a weekend trip from DC.

But that doesn’t mean that there’s nothing I want to see in the east:

Rehoboth Beach.

The only lake in Delaware, inexplicably only 300′ from the ocean.

For one thing, I still enjoy driving down the length of Delmarva, even if I’ve done it several times before. This time, I got lucky enough to drive through the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel at the exact same time a ship was crossing over top:

For those unfamiliar with the idiosyncracies of the Chesapeake, the entrance to the Bay is bridged by a long causeway from Northampton County (the little pedicle of Virginia east of the Bay) to Virginia Beach and the adjacent huge port cities of Norfolk, Portsmouth, Hampton Roads, etc. Because Norfolk is the home of the Navy’s Atlantic fleet, construction of a bridge across the Chesapeake mouth raised the issue of bottling up the fleet in the Bay if that bridge was ever destroyed. To circumvent this, the bridge was built with two segments that disappear into underwater tunnels (watertight tubes sunken to the ocean floor and covered in concrete and riprap for protection), always leaving an entrance and exit for naval ships. There’s actually a slew of these types of bridge-tunnels all over Southeast Virginia.

Views from Cape Charles, just before the bridge.

After a long day of traveling, I ended up in Cape Hatteras, NC:

Indeed, Piggly Wiggly: the further south I go, the less welcome I feel. I too feel about 57% welcome in North Carolina (which is still pretty good, all things considered!)

One new thing I saw in the Outer Banks was the monument to the Wright Brothers’ first flight, which was pretty cool.

Markers laid out in the now-grassy field (it was still a coastal sandscape in 1903) show that the first three hops were tiny, but the fourth?

That one made it like 800′!

There is older history to see in the Outer Banks as well, including some restored structures associated with the Roanoke Lost Colony:

I don’t see how the colony got lost when they were barely 500′ from the visitor’s center.

Pretty as the Outer Banks were, the focus of this trip has been to head to “The West” as soon as possible, so I didn’t linger long. On the third day of the trip I made it to Asheville and saw some sites there:

Enjoining waterfalls on the Cherokee Reservation.

When I drove east from Alexandria, winter was done and gone, but spring had yet to sprung sprang springed arrive. High up in the Blue Ridge, the trees were all still bare of buds, despite the 70-degree temperatures. It gave me pause: did I start this trip too early? The trees were beginning to bud when I started my 2023 road trip in mid-April, but there was still ice on the trails then too. But this was late March in 2026, and I found this whole period of warmth without weather and spring without sprouts very dissociating.

The Museum of the Cherokee People was very cool, though:

Me too, Salamander, me too :p

It was interesting to learn that the Cherokee have a long history of using masks to identify clan groups within their tribe:

They were quite haunting!

Some masks are more haunting than others when you know their history.

Other sites I saw included Kuwohi (formerly Clingman’s Dome), the highest point on the Appalachian Trail:

Isn’t it disconcerting? All the trees bare (save for the pines)?

The elk didn’t seem to mind ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

If you need a cheap place to stay in Asheville that’s also full of friendly people, I highly, highly recommend the Bon Paul and Sharky Hostel in West Asheville 🙂

This was a lot, I mean a lot a lot, of driving in the first few days. I hit the 1000-mile mark just west of Asheville on only day 3 of the trip. I’d been through 6 states by day 5 of the trip! It’s possible, maybe even likely, that the anxiety and dissociation I felt was due to driving way too freaking much so close to the start of the trip, but… Uh, c’est la vie?

Well, one of the best parts about a road trip is that if things aren’t going exactly like you hoped, you can change them! You can speed up and slow down as much or as little as you want, and by the 6th day of the trip it was time I learned from the best when it comes to moving slowly:

BAD JOKE, EVAN.

Okay maybe that was not 100% appropriate! But I promise I was at Chattanooga National Cemetery for good reasons:

This is the grave of Albert Baker, the only person from my hometown of Commerce, Michigan to die in the Civil War. Commerce is not a place with a lot of history; there were trees, then there were farms, then about 170 years went by until the “Radioactive Boyscout” tried to build a nuclear reactor in a garden shed, the first thing to realle ever happen in Commerce. The second thing to ever happen in Commerce occurred in 2026 when Connor Hellebuck, a graduate from my high school (two years above me), won gold with the US Men’s Olympic Hockey Team. The third thing to ever happen in Commerce is expected to occur between 2045 and 2062.

Anyways, all of this is to say that I found it very compelling to meet someone who knew the home I love so well despite 162 years of separation. I found it more compelling that Albert Baker was willing to leave our home for a noble cause, knowing full well he might not return. He died from wounds received at the Battle of Chickamauga; he was 26 the last time he saw our home. I paid my respects respectfully.

He’s buried near Andrew’s Raiders, the perpetrators of the Great Train Robbery, who are also the first recipients of the medal of honor.

So anyways, on a lighter note, let’s back to the arduous task of moving very slowly for very long periods of time: no one does it better than AT thru-hikers!

I view Appalachian Train (AT) thru-hikers as sort of modern-day monks. And not the fun kind of monks that made weird, herbal liqueurs in Alpine foothills; I mean the kind of monks that walk on their knees over 6 miles of broken granite in order to like, I don’t know, repent or something. This is to say that I find thru-hikers to be a little extra, but extremely compelling in their dedication to their task!

And wow, that dedication is really put to the test by the time they get to Harper’s Ferry, WV! This is a portion of the AT nearish to DC and the thru-hikers that arrive there in April and May look very haggard; the ones that arrive in June and July are on the verge of giving up. So I’ve always wanted to meet some thru-hikers at the very beginning of their journey, when they’re still bright and bon-divant! Full of hope and optimism and freeze-dried ground beef (appetizingly known as “gravel” by the hikers)! That’s why I went to the beautiful vista of Springer Mountain, Georgia, the southern terminus of the AT:

And what a view to send you on your way!

I stood around or an hour or so and chatted with two hikers that came through. One was a repeat thru-hiker and had already done several section hikes of various states. The other was from Alaska and was “just hiking to see how far I can go.” I wished them both well!

There was only one other start in the logbook that day; I wished them well too, in spirit.

Unfortunately, I think the rain and mist kept some people off the trail. A better place to meet thru-hikers was at the hostel 20 miles down the trail, where I stayed the night:

In possibly the best business move ever made, the hostel was selling frozen pizzas to these soaked and frozen hikers for $6 apiece.

I didn’t take many photos of the hostel itself since it was packed to the gills with soaked hikers stripped down to their skivvies, and I wanted to respect their privacy. But I met a lot of interesting people! Among them were:

• A man who had both legs broken in a car crash 5 years prior. He finally regained the ability to walk after 4 years of physical therapy, and his doctors said “you need to walk as much as possible to regain as much of your mobility as possible.” He decided that hiking the AT was a good way to do that (and trust me, it is).
• A woman who worked on Alaskan fishing boats 6 months out of the year monitoring bycatch for NOAA; the other 6 months, she spends traveling, and had always wanted to attempt an AT thru-hike.
• A man outrunning his addictions and “working for a victory, for once in my life.”
• A family on their first backpacking trip together (not a thru-hike, just covering those first 20 miles from Springer to the hostel over several days).
• Even the hostess at the hostel was a former thru-hiker, one who loved the trail so much that she decided to settle in and work at hostels along the route every year, helping new thru-hikers on their own journeys.

What a crossroads! What a fascinating gathering of people! All from different walks of life, all waling for different reasons, all walking very, very slowly through the woods together. I sincerely hope they all make it to wherever they’re hoping to go 💙.

And as for me, it was time to keep moving as well! 7 Days is enough for the southeast; it was time to really, and I mean really, head west.

That’s all for now,

Stay well everyone,

Evan 💙