May 18th - Idyllwild

Woke up and Tom's blisters and now shin splints were still hurting. The decision was made to hitch to Idyllwild for more recovery time. What was supposed to be a hard hitch ended up not being bad. We got our first ride within 15 minutes. A nice bull rider picked us up in his pick-up - we rode in the back with his 2 pups. He took us half-way to another highway junction. As soon as we got out of his truck and stuck out our thumbs, we picked up another ride to Idyllwild. The guy who picked us up ended up being the guy that works at the local gear shop - Nomad Adventures. Tom had fun talking shop with him on the ride into Idyllwild. Since it was still early in the morning, we headed to the local coffee shop. We ended up running into Luke and Jana there who said they were camped out with the Matts at the Campground. It's fun how us thru-hikers just seem to be able to find each other without even trying. The rest of the day was spent hanging out at the campground with the Matts, Luke and Jana, and Amy and Andrew - a couple from Canada section hiking to Big Bear. There were free showers at the campground that felt so good and the laundromat was close by so we got everything clean. That night, we ended up having quite a crew of thru-hikers hanging out around the campfire - I think I counted a total of 15 people at one time (ooops...guess we surpassed the 8 person limit). Luckily, the rangers all go home at 4pm, and since it was a weekday, there was no one else around to complain. We ended up having an unexpected visitor in a VW bus who pulled up. Guess he just came from some Joshua Tree music festival. He was a hoot - the stereotypical 45 year old California hippy. But we had fun with him and he had a guitar. So him and Matt played the guitar while all of sat around telling tall tales.