Brianle - Florida Trail Journal - 2015
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Brian "Gadget" Lewis
City: Bellevue
State: WA
Country: USA
Begins: Jan 12, 2015
Direction: Northbound
Daily Summary
Date: Wed, Jan 7th, 2015
Start: Home
End: Home
Daily Distance: 0
Journal Stats
Entry Visits: 8,077
Journal Visits: 18,255
Guestbook Views: 850
Guestbook Entrys: 10
Florida Trail, Northern Half
My friend Lucky hiked about the southern half of the Florida trail in January of last year (2014), and Lumbar hiked part of it with him.
This year Lucky is hiking the other half, starting from the vicinity of the town of Palatka, and I'm joining him. Lumbar will hike at least part of that with us too, depending on how much time his "normal" life allows him to go off and hike.
I know very little about the Florida trail! I 'joined' the Florida Trail Association; it is apparantly a good idea to have their membership card along in certain cases along the trail, plus it's just a good idea to offer at least minimal support to a long trail you're hiking on (!). I bought their book and smaller data book, and cut those up to take along just the pages that relate. And I'm even trying out the new Guthook Android app for the trail, at least for a small section. Lucky sent me real maps, so I'm set there too.
I'm sure I'll figure out what I need to know along the way, and of course Lucky and Lumbar have a lot of experience on this trail now, so I can lean on their knowledge a lot.
The thing that particularly attracted me to this trail was the idea of getting a jump on the hiking year by doing a fair bit of distance (I'm estimating about 580 miles) at the very beginning of the year. Short of going overseas, where else are you going to do an extensive backpacking trip in January? The trail has a lot of road walking, as I understand it, and the bugs could be fierce, but there's not much elevation gain/loss along the way. So hopefully we'll be able to set a decent pace once we're up to speed.
I'm not bringing my folding keyboard on this trip, I'm going to experiment with typing directly on the little phone screen. I suspect what that means is that I'll end up with shorter journal entries as a result. Maybe that's even a good thing, who knows.
Some basic information about the Florida Trail is here. Despite what the wikipedia article says, I believe the current trail is about 1100 miles long, though there are some route options which alter this.