Day 129

Day 129 – July 14 –  16.9 miles  –   Kay Wood Shelter to Mark Noepel Shelter

(All photos in this post were taken by Flashfire)

Three miles into the day we came to the Town of Dalton.  Stoat and I took a detour to get breakfast at a diner in town.  Meanwhile, Zeus and Flashfire went the post office to pick up a package that was sent from Germany and ate at an overpriced coffee shop nearby.

When we met up with them again, Flashfire was disappointed because her package was not at the post office.  It had been tied up in customs in Germany for 10 days and then it was tied up in US customs for another 10 days.  The guy at the post office didn’t even know where its exact location was.  She wound up having to forward it to the next post office we might pass.

Seven miles later we came to a cliff called The Cobbles.  The view was mostly clouded in, but supposedly we could see the highest point in Massachusetts, Mt Greylock,  on a clear day.

The only other people there were a father and his son who seemed to be about 11.   We piqued his interest when he asked where we started our hike and we said Georgia.  He had all kinds of questions that we were happy to answer.  Around the middle of our conversation we told him about the article that was written about us, and then moved on to other things.  At one point the father took out his cell phone to check a message or something.  A few minutes later he started laughing and he held up his phone.  He hadn’t been messaging anyone.  He found the article!

I guess he may have wanted to make sure the homeless looking guys he had just met weren’t pulling his chain.  He asked us to take a picture with him and his son so he could show his wife when he got home.

Getting out picture taken by strangers was something we had gotten used to.  Sometimes we would be in a conversation with one person, stop to smile in a picture with someone else, and then return to the conversation seamlessly.  It was like we were some sort of trail celebrities.

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There’s one thing I meant to mention earlier in the blog.  People would ask us all the time if we were Thru Hikers.  We would always say something like, ” We are Thu Hiking. We wont be Thru Hikers until we get to the end.”

There’s a lot of things that could happen before we got to the end.  We thought it was presumptuous to call ourselves Thru Hikers until we did the whole thing

It just easier to refer to ourselves as Thru Hikers in the blog.

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We departed from the father and son, full of energy.  It’s amazing how someone else’s excitement can be so contagious.

Not long after leaving the Cobbles we came to the town of Cheshire.

We met up with Zeus and Flashfire at a snack and sandwich stand.

After eating some sandwiches at the snack stand, we passed a Dunkin Donuts.  Everyone agreed that we should stop for some coffee…and maybe some doughnuts.

After we left the Dunkin we had a big surprise.  A newly opened Dollar General!  It was so new that it wasn’t in any of the guidebooks.  That changed everything.  We would now make it into Vermont without having to resupply!

After leaving Cheshire we had a 2000 ft climb up to the shelter.  Even though the terrain was tougher than it was yesterday, the much cooler temps made it feel a lot easier.

Before we got to the shelter it began to rain. We setup our gear, ate dinner and went to bed.  Tomorrow we would be going over Mt. Greylock.  Hopefully the weather will be better in the morning.

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