A Blistered Kind of Love: One Couple's Trial by Trail (Barbara Savage Award Winner)

by Duffy Ballard, Angela W. Ballard

Release Date: September, 2003

Edition: Hardcover

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Entertaining

This book describes a couple's hike along the Pacific Coast Trail...quite an adventure! It doesn't go into great detail about the trail itself; rather, it focuses on the emotions they felt before, (mostly) during, and after the hike. While I enjoyed the book and its descriptions and stories - and marvel that anyone can pull of this kind of long-distance hike - I have to say I was put off by Duffy's apparently insensitivity to Angela throughout...who hikes ahead of their novice hiker girlfriend the whole way, for instance, just because they walk faster? It left a slightly sour taste while reading it, but overall, it was entertaining and easy to read.

Learn how to backpack - hike the PCT

I just finished this - an entertaining read of a couple who thru-hiked the PCT in 2000. Angela had never backpacked before. It gives you a feeling for what the emotional highs and the lows are when hiking the PCT, and they have an upbeat attitude. More detail than Karen Berger's Triple Crown book, not the nitty gritty of Bill Schuette's story of his AT hike - White Blaze Fever.

They tandem team this book, alternating chapters. Normally each chapter progresses farther up the trail, though sometimes you might read about a common experience from two different views. You get some idea of the tremendous logistical problems in doing a thru-hike, and an even better sense of what a relationship test this is.

By the end of the book you feel a kinship with the other thru-hikers they encounter, so it is a nice touch that they have an epilogue, talking about what happened to the other thru-hikers they encountered.