{"id":682,"date":"2006-10-09T21:50:41","date_gmt":"2006-10-10T02:50:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tommangan.net\/twoheeldrive\/?p=682"},"modified":"2006-10-09T21:50:41","modified_gmt":"2006-10-10T02:50:41","slug":"so-long-shasta-hello-damascus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tommangan.net\/twoheeldrive\/index.php\/2006\/10\/09\/so-long-shasta-hello-damascus\/","title":{"rendered":"So long, Shasta; Hello, Damascus"},"content":{"rendered":"

The weekend after Mother’s Day is Trail Days 2007<\/a> in Damascus, Virginia. I’ve made up my mind I’m going. Rick of Best Hikes has the dates — May 18, 19, 20 — penciled it in, and Cutter says he can help with the planning. I liked the idea of doing this even before I learned the following about Damascus<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Damascus, Virginia, is a small town in the Blue Ridge Mountains, and is the gateway to the Mount Rogers National Recreation Area<\/a>. It is traversed by the Appalachian Trail,<\/a> the Virginia Creeper Trail,<\/a> the Trans-America National Bicycle Trail<\/a>, the Iron Mountain Trail<\/a>, the Daniel Boone Trail,<\/a> the Crooked Road Musical Heritage Trail<\/a>, Virginia’s Birding and Wildlife Trail<\/a>, and lies within a short distance of hundreds of miles of other hiking, horse, and biking trails. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Now that, ladies and germs, is a lot<\/em> of trails.
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The primary caveat of Trail Days is that’s Hiker-Palooza, with more stinky bearded white guys than you can shake a Leki at. It draws crowds in the 10,000-20,000 range into a town with a population of less than 1,000. It won’t be pristine solitude; it’ll be a big, noisy ol’ party. Which is all the more reason to go.
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Most blogger meet-ups entail a bunch of geeks getting together for for a few hours of beer, cheeseburgers and lamenting their negligible readership. What we just pulled off with Ho Down No. 1 — a three-day campout five hours from the nearest metro area on six weeks’ notice — showed me that outdoor bloggers have no qualms about kicking it up a notch.
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Next time we’ll have seven months to get the word out and help people make up their minds to come along. With all those trails, biking and running bloggers have a reason to join the festivities. Ho Down No. 2 sounds like a can’t-miss meet-up.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The weekend after Mother’s Day is Trail Days 2007 in Damascus, Virginia. I’ve made up my mind I’m going. Rick of Best Hikes has the dates — May 18, 19, 20 — penciled it in, and Cutter says he can…<\/p>\n

Read the whole thing<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[53],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tommangan.net\/twoheeldrive\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/682"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tommangan.net\/twoheeldrive\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tommangan.net\/twoheeldrive\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tommangan.net\/twoheeldrive\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tommangan.net\/twoheeldrive\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=682"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.tommangan.net\/twoheeldrive\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/682\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tommangan.net\/twoheeldrive\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=682"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tommangan.net\/twoheeldrive\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=682"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tommangan.net\/twoheeldrive\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=682"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}