i'm in new hampshire!!! :)

i am in my last state of the AT!!! :)

 

i crossed into new hampshire yesterday. these last couple of days have been amazing. God has truly blessed me with trail angels... two days ago, poppins and i were coming down a mountain and a guy yells at us from his back porch, "you guys want some coffee?" it stopped me in my tracks, and i yell back, "umm... yes!" so we got to the roadway and turned right, dropped our packs in his side yard, and went in for a cup of joe. baltimore jack (a guy who's hiked the AT 8+ times) was there with a few other hikers and the owner of the house, whose name was dan. to summarize, we wound up staying there for a few hours, and then it was decided that they would slack us south for 13 miles that afternoon. so travis loaded us up in the truck, drove us to west hartford, and at 2:30 that afternoon, we started the 13 mile hike back to dan's house. we got there a little after dark for a completion of a 19-mile day. more people had arrived and a homemade smorgasbord awaited us. there was bbq chicken and pasta salad and corn on the cob... a hiker's dream! dan even gave me the last can of coke! :)

 

i wish i could explain how awesome the next morning worked out. i will try. i will preface it with this: i absolutely LOVE how trusting and amazing the hiking community is.

 

our original plan for that morning was to have travis drive us back to west hartford before he had to leave to go back home to connecticut. however, as i'm packing up my tent, a complete stranger pulls into the driveway at dan's barn, gets out, and asks me if the owner of the property is around. i pointed to dan's house, told him he lives there, and he asked me his name. the stranger's (trail) name wound up being forty-four, and he was there to see if dan wouldn't mind slacking him over the exact same section that we had slacked the day before.

 

no less than half an hour later, forty-four had handed his car keys over to us, and entrusted us to drive his car the half hour north to west hartford and leave it parked and waiting on him for the end of his hike. it wound up working out amazingly for everyone involved because travis could drive straight to connecticut, forty-four got an extra half hour of hiking time that wasn't spend driving to west hartford, and we got to stop by the dunkin donuts on the way. :)

 

i wish everyone in "the real world" was so trustworthy as to give them the keys to your car in absolute faith that it would be exactly where they said it would be at the end of the day.

 

it's 10:30 a.m. and i should be hiking right now, but i've decided that i will take today rather slowly. i haven't been feeling well these past three or four days, and at first i thought it might could be giardia but those "fears" have been put to rest and now i've decided that i am probably stressed and dehydrated and just really tired.

 

here are the following reasons why thru-hiking is SO MUCH EASIER than section hiking:

- you only have to request off from work or quit your job once.

- you have (relatively) no deadlines to work with, so you can take your time with everything

- you only have to pay for transportation to/from the trail once

there are probably many more, but those are the major three that i can think of right now.

 

i've just been stressed about having to meet tim, kira, and heba on a certain date at a certain time. new england has been kicking my ass as far as terrain goes, and it's so hard to tell when it's going to happen. one day will be an easy 7-hour 14-miler and the next day, it'll take me an entire 10 hours to complete the same distance and i'll be completely beaten down at the end of the day. i think it has something to do with the fact that i've been on the trail for over four weeks now and there hasn't been a single day where i've not put my pack on and hiked. granted, i did have one day where i only hiked 3 miles into town and the rest of the day was spent doing town things and relaxing, but i have backpacked every single day for the past month. when i was on the trail the first time, i was out for five months and an entire month of those were complete 0 days. that's a 0 every five days. that means i'm 4 days overdue for rest. :) okay, so maybe i was a little lazy the first time, but i'm kind of amazed at myself for not taking a full day off this time around.

 

i will be in the white mountains of new hampshire in a few days. for those of you who pray, please pray for me. :) i think every hiker is a bit intimidated by the whites because of the extremes of the weather. mount washington holds the record for the second-highest wind speed ever at 231 mph. granted, that was almost 80 years ago, but the unpredictability continues. and i'll be dealing with myself and swayze over it. i know it will all wind up fine in the end, but please pray for excellent weather for the next two weeks in new hampshire. :)

 

 ooh!!! also!!!

yesterday, my AT checklist was completed because i finally saw a tree fall in the woods!!!! (and it made a sound!!!!) :) so now i've seen rattlesnakes and bears and moose and turkeys and porcupines and a tree fall in the woods.