CT – Day 23

Daily Miles: 22
Total Miles: 413

We had a great day yesterday hanging out with Bob and his girlfriend, Kety.  Bob even made a delicious dinner with trout and crawfish caught in the lake just outside his door.  We stayed up late chatting with them, so we were tired when we got up this morning.  We’ll be seeing them again in a few days when we finish the trail.

Bob got us back to the trail early, so we were able to start at our usual time of 6:20am.  The sky was overcast, but there was no rain and the temperature was perfect.

The trail was great this morning, with gradual climbs and a lot of very easy walking.  There were great sweeping views of the surrounding mountains.  It felt like we were walking in a sea of wildflowers all day.  Around every corner, there would be a new batch of flowers to marvel over.

We saw quite a few mountain bikers out for the day, but after a certain point, they were gone…presumably they have a nice loop that they ride.  We saw quite a few hikers on the trail today…probably the most in one day.  We saw a family who was hiking a 76 mile stretch, a north-bound CT hiker, 10(!) south-bound CT hikers and probably over ten bike packers all headed south.  

We had hoped to do more miles today, since the trail was so easy, but the rain held us up several times.  We were stopping for lunch when we felt the first rain drops, so we put up a tarp and ended up waiting out a pretty intense rain/hail storm for over an hour. After lunch, we made it about another hour before the rain came back, so we took refuge under a giant pine tree for 45 minutes.  Once the rain tapered to sprinkles, we headed back on the trail and endured the sprinkles for several hours before stopping for our dinner break. The rain increased when we stopped to eat and is still going strong.  So, we didn’t get any “after dinner” miles in.  

We realized as we sat down to cook dinner, that we hadn’t bothered to pick up any water for awhile. So, we had enough just to cook and clean the pot.  Not even enough water to make hot chocolate that SweetPea had picked up at the store.  We ended up putting one of our water bottles under the edge of the tarp to collect the drops of rain that ran off the edge.  We managed to collect a half bottle before giving up.  We had considered going just another .8 miles to the next water source, but based on the number of people who had passed us during our dinner break, we figured that there would be at least 15 people camping there.  So that idea wasn’t very appealing.  We’re just going to make our half bottle of water last us until tomorrow morning.