"I Had A Big Old Blank Canvas." - Watergirl (Part I)

Andrea Zelinski had been covering the Texas State Legislature for the Houston Chronicle for years and was newly divorced when a stranger on the Appalachian Trail in Vermont looked her in the eye and said: you should absolutely do it. Five steps later she knew she was going to hike the AT. By the time she got back to the parking lot she had worked out the plan. This was 2018. She quit her job, put everything in storage, made arrangements for her dogs, and booked a March 2020 start date. The rest of that sentence writes itself. She delayed four months, started June 6th, flip-flopped at Grayson Highlands, drove a rented car to Maine, and hiked southbound until the ends connected. She finished January 5th, 2021. She has a tattoo on her forearm that functions as a trail diagram for explaining flip-flops to people who don't know the trail. In Part 1, she and Doc cover the Hiking Poll (score of 24 — 30 points deducted for having done two of the three American long trails), the lightning-strike Vermont moment, what it was like to hike the AT in a near-empty pandemic year, and how a family of five with a minivan full of McDonald's in Maine gave her back something she hadn't realized she had lost.

Part 2 drops in 10 minutes.