{"id":151,"date":"2016-05-20T06:00:01","date_gmt":"2016-05-20T06:00:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/montybillpct.net\/blog2016\/?p=151"},"modified":"2017-05-20T16:10:29","modified_gmt":"2017-05-20T16:10:29","slug":"anatomy-of-a-zero","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/montybillpct.net\/blog2016\/2016\/05\/20\/anatomy-of-a-zero\/","title":{"rendered":"Friday, May 20 Anatomy of a Zero: GRANTS"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"may-20-2\"<\/strong>SUMMARY:\u00a0 <\/strong>We had a great zero day today, and when we went for lunch to the Chinese buffet we joined a tableful of other thruhikers.\u00a0 Of course they asked, “When did you start?”\u00a0 and when we told them “April 30”, they rolled their eyes and said, “What did you do–RUN here??”\u00a0 Well, we didn’t run, but we did keep walking a lot.\u00a0 So what did our zero look like?\u00a0 Sleep in, eat big breakfast, do laundry, pick up resupply box, lunch at the buffet, do the mending, load food bags, take a nap, finish the journal, eat dinner, go to bed.<\/p>\n

DETAILS:\u00a0 <\/strong>We seriously needed a zero today–we are so tired.\u00a0 We’ve been pushing it a lot–maybe too much–and proof positive came at lunchtime today. We went to the Chinese buffet.\u00a0 Buffet ANYTHING is going to be a thruhiker magnet, and this was no exception.\u00a0 We walked in and were standing there looking around when we heard a call from one of the tables– “Are you CDT?\u00a0 C’mon over and sit at the hiker table!”<\/p>\n

So we joined 4 other CDT’ers and of course one of the first questions they asked was “When did you start?”\u00a0 We told them “April 30”, and all their jaws dropped.\u00a0 “Seriously?” they said.\u00a0 “What’d you do–RUN?”\u00a0 Turned out that all of them had started a week or more before we did.\u00a0 But where we basically did a series of pit stops in town, they had done neros or even zeros.<\/p>\n

Of course we all had fun telling trail tales….only I think for the CDT, it’s more like war stories.\u00a0 Everyone has concluded that this trail is beyond tough:\u00a0 it’s brutal.\u00a0 But there in the Chinese restaurant, all our aches and stress faded as we laughed together and ate and ate and ate.<\/p>\n

Since we didn’t do any miles today at all, I thought I’d do a little description of the anatomy of a zero day.\u00a0 It goes something like this:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Slept in till 7:30.\u00a0 At that point we were starving hungry and had to get up and go eat.<\/li>\n
  2. Went to Denny’s and had a Lumberjack Slam each.<\/li>\n
  3. Went shopping at Walmart to get another umbrella for Fixit (he lost his already)<\/li>\n
  4. Go back to motel and tackle laundry.\u00a0 Begin by prewashing filthy socks in the wastebasket, then off to the laundry room, where I discovered they have no soap for sale.\u00a0 Had to go to Walgreens for soap and come back.\u00a0 Since I was only doing one load, that meant a lot of soap left over.\u00a0 Oh well.<\/li>\n
  5. While laundry was going, went back to motel room and cleaned\/reorganized my pack plus finished writing yesterday’s journal.<\/li>\n
  6. Went out front to sit on curb and wait for trail angel Carol Mumm to come along with our resupply box.\u00a0 Was joined by fellow CDT’ers Half Mile (Yes!\u00a0 THE Half Mile!! Great to meet him in person!) and Afloat.\u00a0 Carol Mumm soon arrived and told us some hair raising and awful stories about how she and Hugo were being harassed and even threatened by the BLM for the “crime” of putting out water caches along the trail for the hikers.\u00a0 Unbelievable!\u00a0\u00a0 Our tax dollars at work to make life miserable.\u00a0 I guess the BLM guys south of Grants are nice, but to the north it’s another story.<\/li>\n
  7. Go to the Chinese buffet for lunch.\u00a0 Hang out with the hikers and relax.<\/li>\n
  8. Fixit found a small\u00a0towel lying by the road.\u00a0 He wanted me to make a couple of even smaller towels out of it.\u00a0 So I cut it in half and hemmed up 2 little towels.<\/li>\n
  9. Naptime.<\/li>\n
  10. Write down today’s journal.\u00a0 \u00a0Load food bags and packs.<\/li>\n
  11. Go to Denny’s for dinner.<\/li>\n
  12. Crash.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    SUMMARY:\u00a0 We had a great zero day today, and when we went for lunch to the Chinese buffet we joined a tableful of other thruhikers.\u00a0 Of course they asked, “When did you start?”\u00a0 and when we told them “April 30”, they rolled their eyes and said, “What did you do–RUN here??”\u00a0 Well, we didn’t run, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-151","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-new-mexico"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/montybillpct.net\/blog2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/montybillpct.net\/blog2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/montybillpct.net\/blog2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montybillpct.net\/blog2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montybillpct.net\/blog2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=151"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/montybillpct.net\/blog2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":946,"href":"https:\/\/montybillpct.net\/blog2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151\/revisions\/946"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/montybillpct.net\/blog2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=151"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montybillpct.net\/blog2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=151"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montybillpct.net\/blog2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=151"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}