The New England Home Stretch

After three months of hiking, I have exciting news.

WE HAVE CROSSED INTO NEW ENGLAND!!

In the time since our last update in Vernon, NJ, we have breezed through New York, Connecticut, and are now in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where one of my dad's college buddies is feeding us steak and giving us a dry place to sleep for the night. It helps that the further north we go, the more people we know. We met up with a number of people between New Jersey and Massachusetts. In Warwick, NY we went out to dinner with one of my mom's best friends named Debbie who I haven't seen since I was in diapers. And two days ago in Great Barrington, MA my aunt Patti picked us up at the trail head and shuttled us around town and bought us pizza. Although this past stretch of trail was not particularly challenging terrain-wise, the weather nearly killed us. We faced a brutal heat wave with temps that reached into the upper nineties. Then, as if the heat wasn't bad enough, mother nature opened the heavens on us for two days straight. It was frustrating at times, but we pushed through. The fact that we are rapidly closing the gap between here and Katahdin is a huge psychological help.

The past week or so, for whatever reason, we have managed to stay with the same group of hikers instead of blowing past them like we normally do. It has been really nice because allows us at least some social interaction when we stop for the night. Our group includes: Bonafide, a middle aged woman from Florida who hikes with an overprotective Portuguese Water dog named "Bone." Little Red and Wolf hail from Durham, North Carolina. Little Red gets her name from her red hair which you can pick out from a mile away. Wolf, her boyfriend worked for an environmental consulting firm in Durham, and before that had spent ten months as a soldier in Iraq.


We have also had the pleasure of hiking with Ziplock and Nitro, a young couple originally from Nashville Tennessee. Nitro wears her hair in braids while Ziplock sports a bushy brown beard that sticks out form the sides of his face, and a blue bandanna around his head. He is affable, with a great sense of humor and a quick smile, and has a remarkable gift for telling stories. Every night, after stoves are put away and the rays of the sun start to disappear behind the canopy of the trees, he produces a small backpacker's guitar and sits and sings Grateful Dead tunes in a soft tenor, as if trying to coax us all to sleep.


Finally, there's Steven. We have been hiking with Steven since we first ran into him in Duncannon, Pennsylvania. He is an odd sight for sure, as he wears a hiking kilt, a button down collared T-shirt, and sports a mohawk dyed electric yellow. Once you get past his odd appearance, he is very nice. He refuses to take a trail name for some odd reason, and now has about ten different ones following him up the trail, and gets a new one every time he goes into town. We were present on one such occasion, when at a bar an inebriated older gentleman staggered up to Steven and slurred, "You look like...an...Electric Lizard." Despite our best efforts, we could not get the name to stick.

Anyway, Steven is a wonderful fellow, originally from Kentucky who is easy going and fun to hang out with. We didn't really get to know Steven until New York, after a particularly brutal heat wave that threatened to kill everyone on the trail forced the three of us to retreat to an air conditioned motel called Anton's on the Lake. There we took a swim and tried to recover from our collective heat exhaustion. Two days after we got back on the trail, my dad received a frantic call from the motel's owners. They were livid because Steven had apparently left without paying his bill and wanted us to say something to him. When we approached him about it, Steven exclaimed, "What do they mean I didn't pay? I couldn't find them that morning so I just left seventy five dollars in cash in the maid's tip envelope!" I believe the whole mess was sorted out in the end.