Wayne's Adventure (In Motion)

So, you only carry one change of clothes. Because you get to choose…clothing OR water and food. And you measure by the gram.

By the time you finally get to a town with a laundromat, any clothes you own have been on your body for 14 straight days and are completely stiff with sweat, dirt, blood, etc.

So, What do you wear in the laundromat? Most hikers wear their raingear.

Because it’s that or you just wear your jacket and “Porky Pig” it with the wedding tackle swinging free.

The hair and the earring cause enough stir in Reserve NM (most conservative town in New Mexico I was told…more than once…by more than one person…not in a friendly way…ever….) without giving the local ladies the “vapors” due to an unexpected viewing of elderly, thru-hiker man-flesh. In my case, raingear was perfectly clean because I haven’t seen a drop of rain since this little odyssey began. Makes the 500 dollars or so I spent on it and the 500 miles I have carried it so far seem really worthwhile.

I think of my visit to the local laundromat narrated like this:

“Welcome to CDT Fashion Week. Today we are featuring new looks for the elderly hiker with no sense of fashion, dignity or self-awareness. Dementia could definitely be a factor here, Jim. Our model, Waystarr, is wearing his Enlightened Equipment VISP ultralight rain jacket. It comes in only one color: I have lost my damn mind Blue. Is hot, uncomfortable, completely useless so far except for modeling. Lucky us. The kicker is it weighs 4.5 ounces and costs $380 dollars. No, I am not shitting you, Jim. Seriously.

Covering the naughty bits….ladies don’t look too close, underwear doesn’t exist on the CDT….is the new Zpacks Rain Kilt. Velcro attachment waist. Guaranteed to blow completely off and into the nearest tree at the slightest breeze. That 1.8 ounce weight does have bit of a function penalty, but it’s lighter than a ketchup packet in you McDonads. Getting busted by local cops on indecent exposure charges is a small price to pay for state of the art thru-hiking gear. The $120 dollars for something that has the mass of a single piece of one-ply toilet paper? That’s another story….