August 23rd-25th, 2018
We spent three days off of the trail. First, we camped at Oxbow Regional Park with my mom, Jenny, Travis, Penny, Gabby, Danny, Eunhye, Rachel, and Flunker. We ate a lot, drank a ton of percolated coffee, swam in a river, showered multiple times, and hand-washed our clothes with dish soap. My second cousin Pearce Beissinger, who lives near Portland, brought his family to the park to meet us for dinner. It our first time meeting them, and it was a lot of fun. On Friday night, it was time to head to the airport to fly to Chicago for our friend Sean’s wedding. Despite the attempted laundering of our clothes, everybody said we smelled too bad to fly without changing. Jenny and Travis lent us each a better-smelling outfit. We’ve apparently become immune to the stench. When getting dressed for the wedding, we learned that our shoes no longer fit–our feet have become 0.5-1 sizes bigger after nearly 2,150 miles of hiking! The wedding was a lot of fun. It was wonderful to see good friends that we don’t see nearly often enough. But, we stayed up very late and will probably pay the price by being too sleepy tomorrow when we get back on the trail.
Our dress shoes no longer fit, so we wore Altras to the wedding 
