On Finishing

We did it! We hiked 2,190 miles from Georgia to Maine. Remember that time when two people who never backpacked before and really had no idea what they were doing went out and crushed the Appalachian Trail? We apologize that our blog fell to wayside on our hike. Our day to day updates were much easier to post on Instagram. For those curious, our page is twocookstakeawalk. Blogging on the trail is incredibly difficult and is a huge undertaking on top of the monumental task of hiking across the country. Cell service can be pretty terrible/non existant and blogging itself takes a solid chunk of time to do. It requires drafting, uploading, editing; all of which take mental energy and focus. This can be overwheming to do when the mountains and sun have been beating down on us all day. With that said, we have so many blog posts planned. If you haven’t gotten sick of us at this point (and we hope you haven’t!) you probably will be when six months of our thoughts/tribulations are purged into blog post after blog post. To give you a heads up, in no particular order, this is what we have planned so far:

– Listy type posts (best of, favorite places, best meals, etc.)
– Advice – this is a big one for us. There is a ton of information out there on people hiking this trail. We aim to provide practical and straight to the point advice.
– Gear Reviews, we experimented with a ton of different gear and companies. Being so new at this, we had no idea what fit, what worked, what didn’t, etc.
-Plans for the furture

On Finishing
There is this illusion that this trail will provide all of the unknown questions we have about life. Once on this quest it seems as if wisdom will come to us a little piece at a time as if Hansel and Gretel left a trail of knowledge for us to pick up. Life is supposed to make sense now that we took a really long walk, right? No. We did hear of a couple friends that knew, I mean actually knew what they wanted to do by the time they finished. They were going to get home and in the proper sequence crush the next task in life. For most, the trail gave us a ton of thinking time and we now understand what we want. The issue most run into is how to go about getting whatever it is they want. For us, we definitely have a couple more adventures planned. More to come on that later. We want to build our own tiny house. We don’t want to hire someone, we don’t want to just pick the color scheme and say we designed it, we want to literally build our own tiny house. Every screw, every nail, every detail we want to learn how to do, and then do it. We still want to cook. In a couple years we know that we will be ready to have a family. We feel blessed that we have discovered not only what makes us truly happy, but we know that there is a way to accomplish everything we want to do. We just have to figure that part out.

We have so many mixed emotions being home. The journey is over and we accomplished everything we set out to. We stayed true to ourselves and our beliefs and persevered one mile at a time all the way to Maine. What’s the issue you may ask? It’s over. The routine we worked so hard to form is gone and we are back to our normal life. Why is that an issue, you may ask? It’s not, really. For us, the work envorioment we thrived in in the kitchen was under the utmost stress and discipline. Before hiking, it was really all we knew and loved. Being in the woods introduced us to the purest freedom imaginable. Stress became only about primal things such as water and safety. Happiness came from non-materialistic things such as a conversation or a good meal. The trick now is applying everything we learned while living away from society to living in society. As we transition more into normal life we will be putting out more blog posts about everything we wanted to while thru hiking. Now that we aren’t walking all day we should have some more time on our hands!

Thank you to everyone who stayed with us and followed along on our extremely bumpy ride of a journey! It wasn’t easy, it wasn’t glamorous, and it wasn’t pretty, but we did it! It was a real pleasure connecting with so many true thru hikers, trail angels, and random strangers on social media. We can’t wait to see you on the next trail but until then we’ll continue to be active on here and on our Instagram! Talk to you soon, friends!

Creedence and Clearwater
Appalachian Trail Class of 2017