A Walk in the Woods, Entry 3

I should be a fortune teller. My prediction was correct, and Bryson and Katz did not finish hiking the Appalachian Trail. Actually, the story got kind of...bizarre...after I left off after my previous post, and more boring, as well. So what happened was, Katz went back to where he was from (where he lives), so Bryson and Katz stopped hiking together on the Appalachian Trail, although they planned to continue hiking at the end of the summer. However, Bryson continued hiking on his own. Sometimes, he just hiked on trails near his house, but eventually he started hiking the Appalachian Trail a day at a time, and driving home each night. I was thinking, how could an adult man have time to just hike every day and then just come home and sleep? What about work and responsibilities? Then I realized that hiking was Bryson’s, the author, job. Well, not hiking, exactly, but traveling and going on adventures such as hiking to write about. I realized that I was reading the product of his job. Whoa...But back to what I was saying about this middle part of the summer and book when Bryson is just taking day hikes alone, I found this part pretty boring. It was just full of facts and statistics about each of the different towns in which he was walking the trail. It was a pretty anticlimactic section that led to an even more disappointing and boring ending. Instead of the vicious nail-clipper bear fight I was expecting, the hiking duo just split up and went home. The biggest action in this story was the idea that there might be a bear that they would have fought with nail clippers, but in reality, Bryson was just scared of a different, unknown animal in the night that was most likely not a bear and was just near Bryson’s campsite to get a drink of water from the nearby stream. The other exciting part was when Bryson was hiking with a different friend of his on the day trips and he encountered some severe climate changes as he was hiking in the mountains and he was convinced that he was suffering from hypothermia and becoming delusional. But, spoiler alert, the temperature went back to normal as he climbed down the mountain, and he was not getting hypothermia (his watch had just broken, so he thought it was the same time throughout the hike, so he was not becoming delusional, he just had a broken watch). What a disappointment, as morbid as that sounds... I just wanted a little action! I guess that’s what Bryson thought, too, and why he had to try so hard to make some part of his adventure sound exciting so people would actually read his book, which is his living. The end of the book was the most disappointing part, though. The pair agree that they will never be able to finish the trail, so they just stop hiking. How’s that for some inspirational motivation! I guess that is like the saying, though, that it’s all about the journey and not about the destination. I, however, find it more rewarding to reach my destination, especially after such an awfully painful journey. I guess that is also like the saying, “At least it will make for a good story”, which is probably what Bryson had in mind, but did not quite happen...Overall, it was a pretty good book that was boring at times (when there were lots of facts) and had a very disappointing plot/conclusion. I would recommend it to read for fun, but not for a school project where you only have a certain amount of time to read a certain amount of books (all the facts and anticlimactic plot kind of slow you down...).