Day 12: Saying Goodbye to the Appalachian Trail

September 15: Amanda left early in the morning to go back to work or whatever it is she does when I’m not around. Being a Sunday, I knew I wouldn’t be able to mail my laptop ahead and I definitely wasn’t going to carry it on this time around. With 9 nights and 10 days of food, my pack would already be excruciatingly heavy! So I had Amanda take it for me, to be mailed later to my next resupply point in Stowe a hundred miles up the trail.

 

I woke up long after Amanda left and headed down for some of the waffles at the breakfast area. The room was packed—far more people this morning than the day before! But surprisingly, not one person was cooking up waffles, so I pushed my way through the crowds, filled a cup with the spice mix and poured it into the waffle-making machine. Not 10 seconds later, someone else who apparently was watching me followed my lead and proceeded to make their own with the other waffle machine.

 

I picked up some other food while the waffle was cooking and eventually it beeped for my attention and I got my waffle. It looked great. I hadn’t even found a seat at a table before someone else started using the waffle machine I just left. I was rather amused every time I heard one of the waffle machines beeping as I ate breakfast. I think I started a trend. Maybe people weren’t sure how to use them? Maybe they weren’t sure if it was okay to use? I don’t know, but I know the room was packed with people and not a single person had made a waffle, then seconds after I started making one, both machines went beeping non-stop for the next 10 minutes.

 

After I checked out of the motel, I got online briefly at the computer in the front lobby. AQ was still running fine, and I left heading out the door. I went to put on my hat and sunglasses—it was actually a bit sunny outside—but I couldn’t find them in my pack. Ahh… shoot. They were still in the room!

 

I told the lady at the front desk of my problem, and she made another key for me to get back into the room where I retrieved the sunglasses and hat before “checking out” of the hotel a second time. And this time, I meant it!

 

I walked into town to the bus terminal where I jumped on the Diamond Express that was already parked in the garage. I paid the $2, and the driver wanted to know where I was getting off. “The Long Trail!” I answered. And he wanted to know if I meant the Inn at Long Trail or the Long Trail itself—which, if you’ve forgotten, are about 0.8 miles apart from each other. “The Long Trail,” I answered.

 

He tried to convince me that he could drop me off somewhere else that would save me a climb up a hill, but I told him that I couldn’t be skipping sections, no matter how small. I really needed to get back to the Long Trail—not a side trail of it! And finally, he relented.

 

I had barely taken my seat when the bus roared to life and started off. My timing was impeccable. (But admittedly, from total luck. I had no idea when the next bus would leave when I arrived at the bus station.)

 

The driver dropped me off at the Long Trail, and I crossed the street and immediately headed back into the trees.

 

After a mile or so of hiking, I head reached Maine Junction—where the Appalachian Trail and Long Trail split from each other. The Appalachian Trail continues largely eastward at this point to New Hampshire and (eventually) to Maine while the Long Trail heads north to Canada. From here on out, I’d be on unfamiliar trail through parts of Vermont I’d never seen before.

 

It’s the one place on the Appalachian Trail and the Long Trail where white blazes intersect from three different directions, and I’ve heard stories of people following the wrong one heading to Canada (when they meant to go to Maine) or vise-versa. The junction seemed well marked to me, though. Long Trail, to the left. Appalachian Trail, to the right.

 

I’d also finally be getting away from those Appalachian Trail hikers that had been filling up the shelters. It’s funny, but when I was thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail, I distinctly remembered being happy to reach this point to finally get to the point where Long Trail thru-hikers would stop filling up the shelters. Now I was happy that the Appalachian Trail hikers wouldn’t be filling up the shelters. Both hikes, that overlapping section seemed too full of hikers.

 

I took a lunch break at the Rolston Rest Shelter where I met another Long Trail hiker named Slowfoot. I didn’t know Slowfoot, but when he learned I had hiked the AT in 2003, he told me that he was a ridge runner through the Smokies that year. I met a ridgerunner in the Smokies that year, who I shared the Tricorner Knob Shelter with for a night. I have no idea if it was the same person or not, but it’s not like there are a lot of different ridgerunners out here. I even mentioned sharing the shelter with a ridgerunner in my blog, but I failed to note his name at the time. I rather liked the idea that we might have met during my AT thru-hike, though, even if we were never able to conclusively figure out if that actually happened or not. A distinct maybe!

 

Slowfoot planned to stop for the day, but I continued on to the David Logan Shelter which also had one other hiker in for the night. His name was Chaos, and he had just completed his own AT thru-hike a couple of weeks earlier. After finishing that hike, he jumped down to Vermont to complete the part of the Long Trail he hadn’t covered, and this was to be his last night before finishing the Long Trail. Then he was going to go to New Hampshire and hit as many of the 4,000-ft peaks as he could before the end of the month and he had to go home.

 

Although Chaos was at the shelter, he decided to set up his tent outside so I actually had the shelter to myself. At least I would unless the predicted rain overnight drove Chaos out of his tent and into the shelter. He hadn’t really been expecting rain when he set up his tarp and when I arrived at the shelter, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. It was beautiful out! But I had checked the weather forecast before I left the hotel and I knew… it wasn’t a matter of if it would rain overnight, but rather when it would start raining, for how long it would rain, and how hard it would rain.

 

This information seemed to give him pause, but he decided to tent it anyhow. It was already set up and it was his last night on the trail anyhow. Even if all his gear got wet, he’d be getting off the trail the next day.

 

Then he headed off to his tent, and I cooked up dinner, read my book, and eventually went to sleep.

 

The Long Trail is well-marked at Maine Junction, but apparently
some AT hikers accidentally follow it a ways anyhow!

 

 

These freshly-fallen trees, I suspect, were part
of the storm damage from a few nights before.

 

Caterpillars on the trail!

 

 

 

 

 

Watch out for snowmobiles! There were everywhere!
(Not really.)

 

It turned into an absolutely beautiful afternoon, but don’t
be fooled—the weather forecast called for rain overnight!

 

Chaos at the David Logan Shelter, talking on his
cell phone. (Some people are more connected
than I am!)

Day 11: Give Me Waffles or Give me Death!

September 14: In the morning, I headed up to the third floor of the hotel where breakfast was being served. Or at least provided. You have to help yourself, really. There wasn’t a lot of serving going on, but I didn’t expect that either.

 

To my delight, they had the little make-it-yourself waffle machines which were primed and ready to go with two choices of waffle mix—the “spice” or “original” flavor. I did one of both! This was such a fancy hotel, they not only had one waffle maker, but two of them! I only used one of them, though, making the waffles one at a time so they’d be hot and fresh when I was ready to eat. =)

 

I got my fill, brushed my teeth, then it was time to do some laundry. I walked to the laundromat while Amanda drove there, then we spent some time figuring out how the place worked since it used cards to run everything rather than coins. We’d never been to a laundromat set up like this and there was a learning curve involved!

 

Then, while my laundry was going, I headed next door to the supermarket to do some grocery shopping. I decided to walk all the way to Stowe for my next resupply—about 100 miles up the trail that I figured would take as long as ten days—so I had a lot of food I needed to buy. Heavy food. Oh, yeah, heavy…

By the time I finished, my clothes had been washed and we headed back to the hotel where I laid out my clothes to dry. We didn’t dry them at the laundromat because nothing was made of cotton so they would have dried pretty darned quick regardless.

 

Then Amanda and I went our separate ways. I wanted to head to the WalMart to pick up a couple of items I couldn’t find at the supermarket then go back to the hotel and work on my blog entries so you could keep reading them every other day even though I’d be offline for as long as ten consecutive days. Amanda wouldn’t be caught dead in a WalMart and had funner things to do than watch me blog.

 

But we got together again for dinner where we headed out to the Ponderosa Steakhouse, then she kidnapped me to go to a letterbox on a long drive out of town. I wanted to get back to the motel to keep working on the blogs, but Amanda forced me to go out to find a letterbox at a rest area outside of town.

 

Then we headed back into town for the night where I ended my first zero day of the hike. =) Not a particularly exciting day, but a pleasant one!

 

Apparently, John Deere was born in Rutland. Who knew?!

 

Poor Harry…

 

Mural in Rutland

 

This is what they do to dogs in Rutland?!

 

Sign and toymaker store

Day 10: And into Rutland!

September 13: It rained overnight—no surprise there—and well into the morning. The weather forecast called for the rain to stop near sunrise so I figured I could wait it out. And that’s how I ended up sitting around in the shelter until 11:30—far later than I ever expected!

 

In the meantime, though, I pulled out my laptop computer and started working on blogs. I didn’t get wi-fi, of course, and obviously I couldn’t plug in anywhere, but it was fully charged when I carried it into the wilderness and it seemed like a good time to make use of that charge. Create a couple of blog posts so they’d be ready to post as soon as I got into town. At least I could get some use out of carrying a friggin’ laptop on the Long Trail for nearly a hundred miles!

 

Which is probably why when a southbound AT thru-hiker arrived, she didn’t pay much attention to me. “Obviously,” I was an idiot weekender that didn’t know better than to carry around a laptop. I did actually say that I had thru-hiked the AT, but I don’t think it really sunk in. Or maybe she thought I was lying.

 

But she was awfully excited to catch up with the other two hikers in the shelter and chatted away like I wasn’t even there. They started discussing the trail ahead—what the conditions were like, how steep it might be up Killington. Hello? I just came from that direction! I could be extremely useful in providing information! But they didn’t seem to care what I thought. Or that I was even there.

 

It was very annoying. So I mostly eavesdropped, occasionally adding a tidbit here and there. But really, I just wanted to slap the whole bunch of them for treating me like a second-class citizen. If anyone was to be treated like a second-class citizen, after all, it should have been them. They weren’t even thru-hikers. Not yet, at least. They were just trying to thru-hike the AT. My two shelter companions overnight I have severe doubts they’ll truly be thru-hikers. This woman might be, but she could hike all the way down to Georgia and back and I’d still have had more backpacking experience than she did. Wanna-be thru-hikers…

 

The three started discussing what shelters they planned to stay at later that night. They had originally wanted to get to Clarendon, but given the weather and their late start, they figured Governor Clement would be more likely.

 

And you know what I thought? I thought, Hmm… I bet they would just love to know about a certain shelter, a secret shelter, that happens to be located directly between those two shelters.

 

And you know what I then thought? I thought, I’m not going to tell them where the secret shelter is. Nope. I’m not even going to tell them that there even is a secret shelter!

 

It was a petty form of revenge, but if they felt that my experience and knowledge of the trail that they would soon be covering wasn’t worth asking about, I certainly wasn’t going to volunteer anything about the secret shelter. Let them stay in that old, moldy Governor Clement Shelter tonight. I didn’t exactly make their hike worse, but I wasn’t going to do anything to make it better either. It’s called karma, I thought ungraciously.

 

Eventually, though, the rain settled down and I packed up my bags and headed back onto the trail. The rain had stopped, but some tree snot continued to fall. I pulled out my umbrella, just in case, but never did end up using it.

 

I arrived at Highway 4 rather quickly, but that wasn’t a surprise since it was less than two miles away from where I camped for the night. I had told Amanda to meet me at the Inn at Long Trail, though, which was—technically speaking—about 0.8 miles to the east of the trail. The Long Trail used to go right by it but had been rerouted years ago and now just comes close to the inn, and I had told Amanda to just wait for me there if she arrived in the area before I did. I kind of thought I’d look for some letterboxes in the area then hike down the Sherburne Pass trail to the inn and wait for Amanda there, but given my very late start in the morning, I now expected she would have beat me to the inn.

 

So I started walking up Highway 4 grumbling a bit about the situation I put myself in. She was probably inside, drinking a beer, while I was doing this stupid road walk. And Amanda could have just driven and just picked me right up from where I got off the Long Trail. Darn that weather!

 

But when I arrived at the Inn at Long Trail, Amanda was nowhere to be found. Hmm… Maybe her flight got in late? Maybe… I don’t know what. I hadn’t been in contact with her since five days earlier when I was in Manchester. What to do? What to do?

 

I putzed around a bit, found a phone I could use and tried calling Amanda, but it went right to voice mail. I left a message letting her know where I was, then called my mom to let her know that I was okay and off the trail again.

 

Now what? Oh, heck, I should just go into Rutland and look for a hotel. I called Amanda again, leaving another message telling her such, then went back outside and waited for the hourly bus to pass by. It seemed easier than hitchhiking.

 

The bus drove up at the appointed time, and I got on and paid the $2. It whisked me away to Rutland, where I got off and proceeded to walk to the Roadway Inn. I had a coupon from one of those hotel booklets you find at rest areas for the place, but the desk clerk just shook his head and said no.

 

“Why not?” I asked. He just opened the book and pointed to the small print at the front of the book that talked about the coupons not being valid during special events and based on availability and such. Which is fine, I understand that—but I still wanted to know why he wouldn’t accept the coupon. If there’s a big convention going on in town, I wanted to know! It might mean all of the hotels might be full! But he just kept shaking his head no.

 

“Is it because you’re already full?” I asked.

 

He pointed to the small print again. Not helpful at all.

 

“Do you have any rooms at all?” I inquired. And again, he pointed to the small print.

 

Do you understand English? I thought to myself.

 

“Fine,” I finally told the man, “I’ll go somewhere that actually wants my business.”

 

And let me tell you—if I’m ever in Rutland again, I will never even try to book a room at the Rodeway Inn there again. Never. Even if they had the cheapest room in town and begged me to stay, I wouldn’t do it because the desk clerk couldn’t answer a simple question: WHY?! Not that he said no to the coupon, but that he wouldn’t tell me why he wouldn’t accept the coupon. Customer service, people! It matters!

 

So I ended up walking towards the other end of the town and wound up booking a room at the Comfort Inn. When I walked into the lobby, I asked if they had any rooms available, and the desk clerk told me they had exactly one room available. “That’s fine by me,” I replied. “I only need one!”

 

He checked me in quickly and efficiently and I was already happy with the unplanned change in hotels. =)

 

I called Amanda again to let her know what hotel I had checked into and I logged online where I finally got an email from her telling me that she didn’t get onto either of the first two flights she tried to fly out on but finally got onto the third flight which is why she was running so late.

 

She did show up about an hour later, though. I got caught up with a lot of email and such, took a shower, and then we headed out to dinner at a local establishment Amanda had noticed on her drive into town. The good life… I didn’t even have to walk there. I let Amanda drive me. =)

 

Not only is the Inn at Long Trail a famous landmark
for both Appalachian Trail and Long Trail hikers,
but—for all you letterboxers out there—it was
also the site of the very first letterboxing event
in the United States way back in 1999. =)

 

This peacock made of hay was across the street from
the Inn at Long Trail and appeared to be trying to
hitch a ride to Killington. (Which was the opposite
direction from which I wanted to go.)