Old Man’s Cave to Logan; Distance = 24 Miles; People Met = 5
One thing I’d like to add from the previous post. While drying off at the Grouse Nest Restaurant we chatted with folks as usual. Christine Dragoo the waitress was full square behind our mission of kindness and shared an experience of hers as a customer service representative at Wal-Mart. A customer had a bad day and was taking it out on one of the employees. Christine came by and diffused the situation by sympathizing with the long day the customer had. At the end the customer gave both Christine and the other employee a hug. In Christine’s estimation you can diffuse almost anything with kindness.
One of our goals in Logan was to meet Dan Priedeman and pick up a box of Systems out of Balance books we dropped off with him in Columbus on our way out to begin the journey. We first met Dan and his son Doug when we hiked the Continental Divide Trail in 1985. Doug hiked with us for a month, Dan for a bit less than that. We met at a Bob Evans restaurant where Dan treated us to dinner.
Dan Priedeman
Dan caught us up on Doug and the rest of his family, a change of pace. Instead of the conversation of new friends that we have so often this was more of an old friend vintage. Dan also asked me what I wanted to accomplish with this journey. That caused me to once again give some reflection to how I should shape the message. I did not say this to Dan at the time, but the newest iteration of expressing our cause will be: “promoting the kindness of people and virtues of community to overcome the problems of mass society.” Among those problems are restricted access to Housing, Health and Food (Hunger).
We encountered another trail angel business on this stretch, a B&B called A Georgian Manner. The proprietors, BJ and Linda King, encountered ADT hikers in 2010, so when BJ spotted Cindy and I with our full packs on he was predisposed to stop us and find out what we were about. He insisted we spend a night at his B&B; actually, he encouraged us to spend two nights but a speaking engagement prevented that. A Georgian Manner is quite impressive with its décor, but I liked the hot tub best.
Linda and BJ King
In addition to his kindness towards us, BJ is involved in mission work abroad, such as building the first free school in Honduras. He was involved with Medical Ministries for a time and now is heavily involved with Village Mountain Mission. I was going to include a podcast of his work with VMM, but I thought it significant enough that I’m going to incorporate it in the Ohio edition of the newsletter. The podcast will also feature pictures of A Georgian Manner and should be coming out in two weeks; sign up for it now if you haven’t already.
We learned of Linda’s own brand of kindness, namely, taking care of her ailing dad with Alzheimer’s and then, a year after his death, taking care of her brother with cancer. We had a hard time leaving these two kind people and kept prolonging our conversations in one way or another.
Other Photo
