Date: 2003-07-01
From: Morgan Stewart Shelter

To: Kent, CT
Miles today: 29.8

Total distance 29.8 from Morgan Stewart Shelter to Kent, CT. Today was practically a repeat of the walk yesterday in terms of distance and time. I got up a little bit slower. I had a hard time getting out of the hammock. It¢s usually pretty comfortable. This morning it was definitely cooler when I woke up. By 6:30 the sun was really bright. It was a crisp, clean day. The thermometer read 58 degrees which is the coolest it¢s been in a long time. I finally forced myself to get out of the hammock and cover myself in DEET. I got all my sleeping clothes packed up. I ate the other half of my roast beef hoagie. Again, my destination was another deli which is 11 miles away and I figure I can get there by lunchtime. I started hauling butt. I stopped for water 2 times to fill up. It¢s the same kind of terrain again. Up and down and up and down with a couple of road blocks and stuff like that. I managed to get to the deli right exactly at noontime¢¦at lunch. The place was called Tony¢s Deli. It was completely packed with factory workers or construction workers..whatever. It took me like twenty five minutes to get my order in. I went ahead and got a roast beef roll again. On the way down I ran into Bob, Mike, Bob Team. Team Bob, Mike, Bob were a father and two sons. Bob was the father and I thought that was pretty cool. The son¢s were in their 20¢s and they were thru hiking together. Anyway, they were walking up from the deli which was called Tony¢s Deli at Stormville, NY. 6/10¢s of a mile off the Appalachian Trail. I met them about halfway down. We stopped and talked for a few minutes and exchanged some news. They told me that Spiderman was a couple hours ahead of me. They had passed him up early in the morning and he had been in a big hurry to get somewhere. He was moving on. Anyway, I went down to the deli and got my roast beef roll and a couple of Pepsi¢s and a beer to go. I sat there for about an hour. They had a picnic table out front. I got up about 1:15 or 1:30 and started hauling it again. I was walking really fast. I had to start booking it because what we were looking at was a long run all the way in to Kent. At some point late in the afternoon I crossed the New York/Connecticut border and things changed pretty drastically after that. I thought NY was beautiful but Connecticut was even prettier in the woods. Very nice stuff. I passed Bob, Mike, Bob again. They were going to camp out by the river. This was about 5:30-6:00 in the evening. I¢m about 10 miles short of Kent. They said they were going to camp out there and I decided to keep on moving. I got into Kent about 8:30 at night and went to the Episcopalian Church which was supposedly a hostel. That was really confusing. I couldn¢t find the pastor. I couldn¢t find anyone to find out what the heck was going on in that place. I asked at the gas station. I asked at the ice cream place. I finally ran into a thru hiker sitting at the church. I didn¢t even know he was a thru hiker at first. He turned out to be a guy named Drifter. He told me that it was all very confusing¢¦.that the pastor came in and he said it wasn¢t a hostel but he could stay and sleep on the nursery floor. They had a nursery that was separate from the church which was cool. I just dumped my stuff off there. I was pretty hungry so I walked down to the Pasta and Grill to get some food. I ended up just ordering onion rings. What happened was I walked in the Pasta and Grill and there was Flatlander. Sure enough. It¢s kind of weird how you run in to people sometimes a couple hundred miles apart. You walk into a place and there¢s somebody you haven¢t seen in a week or two weeks. Sometimes 2 months. It turn out the Flatlander was also staying at the Episcopalian Church and he had also talked to the pastor. He gave me a slightly different story than Drifter did. He said the pastor told him to just go ahead and come back later in the afternoon after the nursery closed and he could stay there and that he was pretty cool about it. Him and I sat there for awhile. I ate and shared some beers with him. Then we went back to the church and ended up going to bed about 10:00 or so. Total distance 29.8 from Morgan Stewart Shelter to Kent, CT.