Oregon continued to bless Tinkle and I with a free beer at Callahan’s Lodge before we got a ride into Ashland. Tinkle and I had joined with Dish, Jetpack, and Aurora after the border and we planned to share a hotel room together. Jetpack had worked as a chef and said he’d make us food if we got a place with a kitchen. As thru-hikers, we were food-motivated above everything else, so this was the highlight of this stop. We stopped at the inn and dropped off our packs. I left to go shopping for resupply.  It was my plan to use resupply boxes for most of the rest of the trail, which meant I had to buy all of my food for the next month, organize it, and mail it ahead to different post offices to pick up as I got there. Some people supply for the whole trail this way, but this was my first time trying to plan on such a scale. I went to a store that was rated really well by hikers and dug in. It was a really cool place, but I was totally unprepared. It was rated well because it had healthy food sold in bulk, which was completely out of my wheelhouse. I had been surviving on ramen, Pop-Tarts, packages of instant oatmeal, and foil tuna packets. I almost had a panic attack in the store, not knowing how I was going to live on Ziplocs of quinoa in the backcountry. I decided to only supply for Oregon and figure out Washington at the next larg(er) trail town, grabbed a bunch of stuff, and left. That night, we ate a ridiculous amount of Chinese food on the floor of the hotel room.

I’d been planning on leaving the next day, but decided to take a zero and resupply for Washington as well from Ashland. I made a master list of what I’d need for when we went to a grocery store with all of my precious name brand junk foods. As a plus, the store had a USPS kiosk so that we could pick up boxes to take back to the inn and use to pack our resupplies. Tinkle, Dish, Jetpack, Aurora, and I did some laundry, I sent a box ahead, and we took a taxi back to the inn with our loot. Tinkle and I started separating everything into sections. Somehow, I ended up with an extra box’s worth of food and started panicking again, wondering where I’d made a discrepancy. I figured out that  I’d just been wrong and got over the panic just in time for sushi. Jetpack had been a sushi chef and had picked up everything he needed in order to make us more than two huge trays’ worth of sushi. It was delicious and he’d made it all with a sushi roller he’d made out of skewers. It was incredible.

I’d been planning for a long time to skip a section of trail. As the end neared, I counted down instead of up from the beginning. I was figuring out how many miles I had left and how many days I had to do it in. I needed to be finished by September 9th in order to make it to a wedding in which I was the maid of honor. The numbers didn’t look good. I’d have to average 30 miles every day, which left me no leeway. Having this on my mind probably had something to do with grocery store panicking. I wanted to get a ride from Ashland to Crater Lake, about 100 miles ahead. That made the necessary daily mileage 26, a much more doable number.

The next day, Tinkle and I went to the inn’s breakfast area to find Daisy Dukes! He’d just gotten in and would be staying at the inn that night, so they let him eat breakfast. We reunited over the waffles, yogurt, and fruit. I told him about how I needed to skip ahead and he pulled out a business card from a guy who’d given him a ride into town. I texted him and he responded that he could do it that day, but it would cost a good amount of money. I took him up on it and we planned to meet later. Daisy joined Tinkle and I in going to the post office, where I sent off my packages and picked up another from my friend. At that point, our errands had to take us in different directions, so it was time to say goodbye to Tinkle and Daisy Dukes. It was really sad, but the gravity of splitting up with them didn’t hit me until later. We had set up our sleeping pads next to each other at Scout and Frodo’s before we’d even started the trail and spent three and a half months together, experiencing the highest highs and lowest lows. They had become my tramily. I was striking out on my own for the first time since I’d been dropped off at the airport in Detroit. I was very nervous, a little excited, and a lot sad to leave my friends. I didn’t know what the rest of the trail held for me, but the beginning that I’d spent with Daisy Dukes and Tinkle was damn fine.