As the last two days, I got breakfast from the hotel's self-serve breakfast room. Then I finished packing, and left the hotel at 9:30 with what felt like my heaviest pack ever.
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Like yesterday, I slept in a bit and grabbed breakfast in the hotel's breakfast room. Returning to my room after eating my fill, I began planning out the next week of hiking; I needed to resupply my food at some point today, and knowing how far I was going to go before my next resupply was somewhat important.
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On Saturday, I got to sleep in a bit before my mom, my uncle Jack, and his fiancée Kathy, arrived at my hotel in Harpers Ferry shortly before 10. My mom brought a few things from REI: new boots (the ones I started the hike with were starting to be in pretty poor shape), socks, and rubber trekking pole covers to use in rocky areas. She also brought a bag of Jolly Ranchers and a bag of homemade chocolate chip cookies (yum!). My uncle brought a box of 24 Clif bars, which was quite a bit more than I needed. (That many would probably last easily 120 miles, if not more; it'd be easily two resupplies worth of bars. When I do the rest of my food resupply in town, I'll probably wind up getting fewer Snickers bars and eating extra Clif bars in place of Snickers, to keep the weight down.)
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I wound up leaving the hostel a bit later than I wanted; 8:30 rather than 7:30 or 8. My target today was Harpers Ferry, specifically, the Econo Lodge that's just off the trail after it crosses the Shenandoah River. While I didn't need to get in early (I made reservations yesterday during one of my breaks), I still didn't want to get in late enough that getting dinner would be problematic.
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Although I wanted to leave at 7 am today, and the "compromise" time that was agreed upon was 8 am, we didn't actually wind up leaving until closer to 8:30 (due to another laundry mishap on part of the other hiker taking the shuttle; it turns out that lightweight hiker clothes don't dry very quickly when there are towels in the dryer). This meant I wouldn't get started on my 21 mile hike to Bears Den Hostel until almost 9 am.
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