Date: 2012-09-20
From: East Branch of Pleasant Ricer

To: Jo Mary Road
Miles today: 11.5

It is Thursday and I am scheduled to leave Millinocket and drive into the wilderness to meet up with SOS and NL at White House Landing. I haven't heard anything since Tuesday morning so the mileage is still wrong and will probably be wrong until Saturday when I will be back in Millinocket and SOS will be hiking the rest of the wilderness and into Baxter State Park. Nancy and I went to the AT Cafe for breakfast and saw several hiker friends who are going to try and summit today. It is a perfect day...absolutely clear blue sky, sunshine and temp in the 60's....just what I want for my hikers next Tuesday or Wednesday. However the forecast (which has been known to be wrong) is saying rain...please pray that it doesn't happen!Nancy and I went several places trying to get another charger cord for her phone. She thinks she left her in a hotel room in New York so can't leave her phone on for Tim to call. So far we haven't found one. I called White House Landing which is where I am supposed to drive to this afternoon and imagine my surprise when I found out that I can't drive all the way there! No one ever mentioned this fact before. So now I have to rethink my plan. I have all of SOS and NL's resupply food, our food and cooking things, my sleeping bag and stuff, clothes, etc. to carry 1/2 mile on a muddy road into this hostel. I have my day pack so will try to get as much as possible in there, put on my hiking boots, and take off down the road. We will have a cabin but no running water (something else to carry in), an outhouse, and a shower room near by. So it is what it is and I will deal with it when I have to... I don't think I will be able to update the journal until Saturday when I am supposed to be back in Millinocket for 2 nights and then back to Baxter to another campground. Hopefully by Wednesday night of next week, this adventure will be over and I will have my husband back where he belongs...beside me...stay tuned!Well, surprise, surprise...the plan changed yesterday after I wrote the journal! SOS called while I was leaving the library and the connection was terrible so I was trying hard to hear what he had to say. The bottom line was that he and NL had to take a zero and camp on the trail because of heavy rain again. They couldn't ford the river so a group of them camped out for the day by the river...that put SOS and NL a day behind SO.... they wanted to be picked up at Jo-Mary road...a logging road which goes into the wilderness. Nancy nicely agreed to ride out to pick up our hikers at 5:15. When we got off of Hwy 11 (paved) and onto Jo-Mary, we had to stop and pay a "road use" fee of $20!!!!. So after I paid up, on I went for 11 more miles on a dirt logging road. There are no signs marking the trailhead so we just kept looking and using our coordinates. We were both looking the other way for the spot when we heard someone yell...it was SOS coming out of the woods! We packed them into the car and I drove the 27.1 miles back to our hostel. They were hungry so we went straight to the AT cafe for dinner. Laundry, and showers and repacked for 4 more days in the wilderness ended our day. Road Name of the Day: TURKEY TAIL ROAD   Nancy saw this one..it amuses me how fast friends in the car get into looking for road names! We saw no turkeys and hence no turkey tails...