Episode #56 - Jay Parker (Beans)
Mighty Blue On The Appalachian Trail: The Ultimate Mid-Life Crisis
Steve Adams
4.8 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 12 October 2017
⏱️ 76 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
I met Beans in my first couple of days on the trail. We shared a particularly funny evening in a bar in North Carolina and I found him to be a very funny, free-spirited kind of guy. He joined quite a large group of hikers who stayed together for several hundred miles. I would often turn up at a shelter in those early weeks to find them all having a lot of fun as a trail family. As these things do, the family split up over time and I ran into Beans once more, somewhere in Virginia. I last saw him in Port Clinton, where I noticed that he was distinctly quieter and more thoughtful. He still made me laugh, but his growing introspection was apparent. 
In our conversation, he was quietly intense as he considered everything carefully. I even had to edit quite a few of the pauses, from both of us, in order to maintain the flow. Despite that, it was great to catch up with one of my trail friends as he works through what the trail meant to him. You can read Beans' blog at northboundatthruhike and connect with him on Instagram under the name of j.bird1. 
In this week's Doc Spot, Lynne Savino gives us some great advice on the type of things we should consider for our first aid kit on the trail. The third interview this week is with Rawmin Ehyai, from Gregory. I took the Gregory Baltoro 65 backpack on my trip and, as I have with other pieces of equipment that I took with me, I wanted to know more about my pack.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Mighty Blue on the Appalachian Trail, the ultimate midlife crisis, joined Stephen his guests every week as he staggers from Georgia to Maine. |
| 0:26.5 | Hi, and thanks for coming back to the show. We reached episode number 56, and I'm happy to be |
| 0:32.9 | speaking with Jay Parker, who was otherwise known as Beans when we hikes the Appalachian Trail in 2014. |
| 0:41.0 | Since I've returned from the trail, I've watched Jay through the questionable magic of Facebook, |
| 0:45.9 | putting some of the lessons he learned on the trail into practice. He's a very deliberate thinker |
| 0:50.7 | and has become a very deliberate speaker. I've edited out a lot of the pauses on both |
| 0:56.1 | sides that we shared, mainly to keep the flow of the conversation going. I don't think that this |
| 1:01.2 | loses the point of his reflections in any way that we certainly had an extended conversation. |
| 1:06.9 | I've rarely come across such a transformation, at least from my memory of him. |
| 1:16.6 | The good news is that he regards himself as a work in progress, aren't we all, and he feels that he's going in the right direction. I think you're going to enjoy hearing from Beans in a |
| 1:20.5 | moment. I've also got another conversation with Lynne Savino in Doxpot. This week, Lynn is going to tell us a kind of optimal first aid kit to consider. |
| 1:31.5 | I think she's telling us this stuff in as clear a format as possible. |
| 1:35.0 | I can only judge that by telling you that even I have a vague understanding of what she's |
| 1:39.2 | talking about, as I'm certainly not the sharpest knife in the drawer when it comes to medical matters. |
| 1:44.6 | As a bonus this week, I also spoke with Romine A.I. of Gregory. |
| 1:50.0 | I don't know if you remember this or not, but I did a couple of interviews on the show many |
| 1:53.4 | months back, highlighting some of the gear that I took with me on my 2014 through hike. |
| 1:58.6 | We talked about my tent, my sleeping bag, and to be honest, I kind of dropped the ball over this. |
| 2:04.8 | The pack that I took with me was a Gregory Bautoro 65, suggested to me by Outdoor Gear Lab. |
| 2:10.5 | I loved it, and I wanted to find out more. |
| 2:14.5 | Rameen will be along after Lynn. |
| 2:17.1 | Now, a very reflective Jay Parker or beans. |
... |
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