Ahh, Whitney Houston. So much fun hiking with him.
Yes, we’re hiking with Whitney Houston. However, the Whitney we’re hiking with is a 27 year old guy from Oklahoma. He was excited by the mileage we were hiking and since we caught him, he hasn’t let us pass. We’ve since been pushing each other to 25 plus miles per day.
A quick history on his name and then I’ll tie this into food and the Mexican restaurant. The way I heard it was that on day one of the trail, our friend was taking a break and met some other hikers. They were decked out in heavy duty hiking gear and they all had chosen macho trail names like Snake or something tough like that. They asked our friend his trail name; he didn’t have one yet but had a Whitney Houston song from The Bodyguard in his head so he said, “Whitney Houston”. They said he couldn’t be Whitney Houston, maybe it wasn’t cool or didn’t make sense. He said from that point on, he decided to be Whitney Houston.
So we’ve been hiking together for the past few days and on Sunday, we stopped in a town that had a shuttle into the heart of town with a grocery store and numerous restaurants. Whitney didn’t want to make the trip but we couldn’t pass it up as a meal sounded awesome, and we had to resupply to get to Damascus. We told him we’d hike out that night and find him on the trail where he was camping.
Our shuttle into town was supposed to go in at 6pm and would return to pick us up at 8pm. Whitney said he was out only 30 minutes and there was space for our tent so we figured we’d have no problems finding him. After an awesome meal at a Mexican restaurant where we ordered three entrees and finished two bowls of chips and salsa, we were ready to head back to the trail. The shuttle was late picking us up and we didn’t get back to the trail until 9pm. However, we were ready to go and catch up with Whitney Houston.
We kept track of our watch and were looking for him around the 30 minute mark. However, we couldn’t find him. It must have been quite a sight to see Julie and I with our headlamps on calling out into the night, “Whitney Houston”. We didn’t find him and eventually resigned ourselves to hiking up to the next shelter. We hiked until around 10:30pm before finally finding a good spot in the dark to get some sleep.
And it was all so worth it. The food was excellent, we picked up lots of good food for the next few days on the trail from a real grocery store, and we got in 28 miles for the day. Whitney Houston caught us later the next day and has been hiking with us since. We can tell now that food is gaining significantly in our priorities as we were willing to hike until late into the night in order to indulge in some excellent restaurant food. We lay in the tent at night talking about what we’ll eat at the next town (ice cream is high on Julie’s list at the moment) and figure out what mileage we’ll do with Whitney Houston tomorrow.