Oh blessed zero day thank you so much for coming today. Today is our 19th day into this seemingly never ending journey. Yesterday we walked our 265th mile into the beautiful city of Big Bear Lake, CA and that is where our bodies have spent the majority of the day lying today.

The human body is an absolute miracle of engineering. It is truly amazing that my 34 year old body can do what it has done over these past three weeks especially after the torture I put it through in my youth and if we are going to be honest here, the torture it endured in my adulthood as well. The body also does a pretty good job of talking to you if you learn its language. It tells you when to chug a liter of water, when to retreat to the shade, when to either eat or stop climbing, and most importantly when to stop walking - that one was easy, your feet go somewhat numb. I'm no podiatrist, but I feel that is a good sign that it is time for a break.

Kristi and I have done pretty well with listening for the most part which can be observed by the fact that we still want to keep on walking and that we have yet to hit the panic button on her InReach that calls in a $25k helicopter ride.

On another note, through trail gossip we found out that one of our fellow hikers was rummaging through their pack the other day and compressed all of its contents in order to conserve space and stabilize the weight. After hiking a mile or so, they noticed that this chopper was getting closer and closer and then it started buzzing her and her partner until it finally landed near them in the desert. They quickly found out that their Spot machine did in fact work and that they had accidentally called in a chopper after pressing the button a few miles back when reorganizing their packs. She is now called Test Run on the trail and was blessed with a nice pilot who passed her no bill. Luckily for me Kristi has graciously agreed to pay for the first chopper ride as long as I continue to be the rattlesnake detector.

Now it is almost 3 o'clock here in Big Bear and we are in much need of leaving this hotel room to go explore the town with as little walking as possible. I think that we are going to try to eat vegetables this round. We are both suffering from food hangovers from the massive amount of fried food, pizza, and dessert ingested in the last day.

This is also a great town to explore as everyone here for the most part appears to love hikers and apparently we cannot hide the fact that we are hikers anymore as people are able to call us out even in the absence of our packs and after showers. We have been offered help in the form of rides and food at least 6 times since coming into town yesterday afternoon. It is pretty overwhelming how much people want to help considering how little we have to offer. Some people just want to talk and we are easily looked at as traveling confessionals due to the fact that we are truly gypsies with no one to tell their secrets to other than the wind.