Day 6 – 86 kms (54 miles)
“It’s time to go home, when you start to smell the donuts.”
It is my favourite quote from two of my favourite friends’ adventure stories. It was Day 13 of a 14-day backpacking trip. Dan was trudging along, pretty hungry and not all that excited about the food rations left in his pack that late in the trip. As he hiked further along, he thought he started to smell donuts. He didn’t eat them on a normal basis so he wondered why all of a sudden he’d be smelling and craving donuts.
He hiked further. He then came to the realization that it was his long hair next to his face that smelled like donuts. He stopped and put a strand of hair to his nose. Yeah, his hair smelled like donut fryer oil. He called out to his friend. “Smell my hair. Does it smell like donuts to you?”
His friend sniffed. He replied, “Yeah, you smell a bit like an apple fritter.”
Back around Day 7, Dan had washed his hair with a travel-size bottle of shampoo left over from a motel visit. He looked through the rubbish he was carrying in his pack. Yep, the shampoo had an apple fragrance. So the remnants of the apple shampoo combined with all of his built-up hair oil had made his hair smell like an apple fritter.
To this day, Evan jokingly still refers to Dan as ‘my little apple fritter’.
Since then, those guys always say that it’s time to hit town, clean up and resupply or go home when your hair starts to smell like donuts.
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