New York: Trail Magicians Galore

I know it has been a while since any kind of comprehensive update. I apologize! Since the shelter I'm in tonight has a power outlet(!) I'll take the opportunity to make a longish post on my phone. (The google map of my travels has to be updated from a computer so not sure when I'll get to that.)

First of all, I'm through New York, for the most part. (I'll swing back and forth along the border with New Jersey for most of tomorrow.) As of September third, I have walked for two months and covered eight hundred miles.

One thing about New York was how amazingly nice everybody was. I got more trail magic in NY than any other state so far. Several people gave me water. (New York is VERY dry and sometimes thirty miles passed without water.) Two pool cleaners at a deli gave me a slice of pizza, a new lighter, and fifteen bucks. A russian guy on a day hike gave me his lunch. His entire lunch. Apples, dark bread and sharp cheese, a hobbit meal if ever I had one. A very nice man taking a walk along a gravel road took me back to his house, for pete's sake, where his wife gave me oatmeal, pop tarts, energy bars, and homemade cookies!

The funniest thing about this amazing generosity is that every time it happened I made a comment about how nice New Yorkers were, and every single person, without fail, made some comment like "oh well not really most people in this state are jerks."

Right. Well not in this hungry semi homeless man's opinion. Thank you, people of New York, for being amazing.

All this niceness was well timed, because I was feeling pretty ragged. High miles, low water, high heat (I spoke a little too freely about the nice fall weather I guess) and a tough, roller coastery trail combined to totally wear me out.

My parents, sensing this exhaustion, very generously paid for two nights at a motel, and I spent a great day sleeping or eating pizza in the bathtub. If you've never eaten pizza in the bathtub, try it some time. You'll love it, I promise!

One of the motel employees asked me if I was hiking or if I was with the Renaissance Festival that was in town.

Apparently the looks are much the same.

The tiny bar of motel soap proved inadequate to the task of cleaning all the layers of dirt off my feet, but I don't really mind. I kind of like having the dust of seven states ground in to me. It's almost...biblical?

In recent days I found and lost Halfway, Cold Beer, Stiltz, Silver Surfer, and Nail. I bumped into Patches last night and he and I have outlined an ambitious plan to get us through Penn, over the halfway mark and well into Virginia in the next fourteen days. Our miles will be big, twenty five on average, so we should catch and pass all of the folks listed above sometime in the next week.

Now that daylight shrinks every day, the key to big miles is an early start, an early (even earlier than normal) bedtime, and very short food breaks. Our alarms are set for four thirty tomorrow. Time to really step on the gas. We both want to be done by the first week of November.

There was a huge storm last night and most of the day today. I walked in the rain with perfect peace, stomping in puddles just for the fun of it, while thunder bounced and boomed off the mountains. The wind and water knocked red and yellow leaves to the ground and scattered them along the trail. Fall is coming, and I can't wait!

One more thing and then I'm done for the night. I happened to be hiking though a state park over most of labor day weekend, which meant that I had a lot of conversations with day hikers and families about what I was doing. One hispanic family refused to believe that I was walking the whole way. They also thought I was from Europe. (The kilt? The red and wild beard? Both?)

A family of Asian tourists took pictures of me and afterwords we chatted for a bit.

"You are really walking the whole way to Georgia?" the father asked.

"The whole way!" I said, inbetween bites of my hobbit lunch. I went on to answer his questions about the trail: how long it is, how long it has taken me, when I will finish.

He shook his head and chuckled. "That is the spirit of America. That is why I love this place," he said. Then he walked off to join his family, leaving me with my lunch and my view of the New York City skyline and a whole lot of interesting thoughts.

Happy Trails
Pawn