[at-l] What got you into hiking and camping? and AT small world thread

[DTimm65344@aol.com (DTimm65344@aol.com)]

As I posted on 10/10/01 shortly after joining the list:

<Until last year, I hadn't done much outdoors activity in 20 years (job, 
family etc. took preference).  My inspiration for getting back into this 
insane (though very fun) game was my mother, who passed away in late 1999.  
Having never done anything like backpack, when she was 40 years old (about 25 
years ago) she bought a pack, trained for several months and flew to Scotland 
to backpack the hinterlands alone for 6 weeks in search of our ancestral 
home.  Needless to say, everybody in the family (me included) thought she had 
lost her mind.  She repeated this feat several years in a row (she found our 
ancestral pile of rocks on her third or fourth trip) covering several 
hundreds of miles of the British Isles.  When my older brother retired a few 
years ago, she became his hiking buddy and they hiked and camped throughout 
Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia until she was no longer 
able to.

My last promise to her was that I'd pick up my pack and be my brother's new 
hiking buddy, which he and I have done since April 2000.>

That's what got me back into hiking and camping.

On the small AT world thread, in the same post:

<Quick story on why I find the AT a fascinating place...

April 2000 I was camped at Beech Gap, North Carolina with my brother on a 
loop hike at Standing Indian.  One of the thruhikers I met was a thru-hiker 
from Florida named "Daybreaker."  Chatted a bit.  Hiked on.  In August 2000, 
at Franconia Notch, New Hampshire on a couple mile walk on the AT with my 
seven year old daughter, ran across... you guessed it... "Daybreaker.">

Black&blue