Date: 2008-05-25
From: Gren Anderson Shelter NJ

To: MayorÃÂÃÂ¢ÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂs House Unionville NY 
Miles today: 20.1

Day 98 ¢ Sunday May 25 ¢ Mayor¢s House Unionville NY ¢ Miles Today: 20.1 Total Miles: 1333.1Today started out with our normal chilly morning in the upper 40s. We stopped at the pavilion atop Sunrise Mountain for breakfast, and as Brakeman started to shoulder his pack, he heard something drop on the stone floor. A rivet had popped on his new pack! Upon further inspection, we also noticed the lift strap was tearing out, and some other stitching was coming loose!! Brakeman was not a happy camper about this whole Gregory pack situation. We walked through a few more pastures and fields. Other than the afternoon heat, it was a pretty uneventful day of hiking.   We were running low on water, which is not a good feeling when it's 80¢s and hot. After 20 miles, we stumbled into Unionville on our last legs.We still had not figured out how to go about staying at the mayor¢s house.   How do we contact him? Can we get a private room? Is it a hostel? Not having any information, we went into the grocery and inquired about camping at the town pavilion. The clerk, a teenage boy, said, "Well, what about the mayor? Let me call the mayor and you can stay with him." Before we know it, he had the phone in his hand and was dialing the mayor¢s number from memory. We quickly inquired if there was a cost, as we do not like to spend $20 each to stay at a hostel. Somehow we have a mental problem spending $40 to share a bunkroom with a dozen of our closest strangers. He explained that there was no charge and proceeded to call the mayor! The next thing we know the car to pick us up has arrived to take us to the home of Dick Ludwick, the Mayor of Unionville, New York.   Driving the mayor¢s Toyota Prius was the mayor¢s assistant, Butch. We enjoyed checking out the quietness of the hybrid car. Butch told us that the first time the mayor drove the car and pulled up to a red light that he thought it had stalled and tried to restart it, as it was so quiet. But it was already running!Upon arriving to the mayor¢s house, a modest 1950s ranch sitting on a large lot, we were immediately escorted to the back deck. A group of friends were gathered and getting ready to grill hotdogs and hamburgers, which was so funny as we had been joking all day about crashing the Mayor's Memorial Day neighborhood party of hot dogs and hamburgers. It felt great to sit down. The Mayor pointed us to an ice chest of soda and told us to help ourselves. We each downed a soda in about 10 seconds flat. It tasted so good. We were so dehydrated. Next, we were escorted back into the house, where we were given a bathrobe and told to shower and hand over all our dirty clothes so that they could be washed. What a sweet deal! The only requirement was that we wipe out the soap dish when we were done because the mayor hates soggy soap in the morning. After our shower, more rules of the Mayor¢s house were explained. We were not to do any dirty dishes. We were to make sure we helped ourselves to anything in the house. If we used any word containing 4 or more syllables, it would cost us a quarter. Based on our poor vocabulary range, we felt really confident in our abilities to not use any ¢big¢ words causing us to be fined. After the rules were explained, we were told to go outside and ¢sit down and put a load on our brain¢. Funny. I wonder how the expression ¢sit down and put a load on your brain¢ came about.We headed back to the deck in our bathrobes to sit down and put a load on our brain. One of the friends had left, leaving the Mayor, Butch and Bill. It took us a while to figure out who Bill was, as he was a very quiet man. He sat there not saying a thing for the longest time but was obviously taking everything in as when we least expected it, he let out a funny ditty or a profound statement catching us off guard. Bill is a man of few words, but each spoken word has great weight.   We eventually figured out that Bill lives at the mayor¢s house. The mayor¢s wife sadly died in 2003 and now Bill's in the picture, serving the role of household chef.   The mayor shared with us that Bill used to be the ma®tre d' at a big restaurant.Dick credits his wife for the idea of opening up their home to hikers. As mayor, Dick had been offering the town pavilion area for hikers to pitch their tents at night. His wife, after some thought, determined that was pretty silly ¢ why would we not ask them to come up to the house and spend the evening with us? The rest is history. Thanks, Mrs. Mayor, for planting that first seed!   The mayor is pretty new to the hostel business. He went to Trail Days a few weeks ago to learn more from other hostel owners, such as Dalton¢s Bird Man, Kincoro¢s Bob Peoples and Erwin¢s Miss Janet. Butch built 8 bunks in the basement and they are in the process of getting internet access and I think a TV downstairs. There are 2 rooms downstairs - the bunkroom and a family room with a Franklin stove. Three bedrooms, one bathroom, a living room and a kitchen are located upstairs, so it's going to be a little tight with a full house of hikers, but again it's a really sweet deal and they are really friendly people. Just to be able to sit outside on a deck with the grill going, overlooking a manicured lawn with a vegetable garden felt so foreign to us. It¢s been a long time since we¢ve seen or been at a home, let alone a home with a lawn, a neighborhood and a garden. The entire experience was very nice and relaxing. When we do get to Katahdin, we are to send the mayor a picture of our success. That's the only thing he ever asks and he doesn't take money for his services, although we¢re not sure how long that can last. We had a great Memorial Day grill out with the mayor and his friends, complete with hot dogs, hamburgers, a cabbage stew with carrots, potatoes and sausage, a radish salad, a tossed salad, and a dessert of fresh strawberries and ice cream. It was darn good eats. Life was sweet and luckily, since we have our appetites a bit more under control, we ate almost like normal people and did not embarrass ourselves by eating like disgustingly hungry thru-hikers. Over dinner the mayor told us about Unionville. It is quite the small little town with a population of just over 500. The town is 1 square mile with 3 miles of roads, of which over 90% are dead ends. You would think that with so few roads that everyone would know the names of all of them, but as we hiked into town we found that was not the case. Per our guidebook, Lott Road would take us to Unionville. Needing confirmation that we were on Lott Road, we flagged down a car that just pulled out of a driveway and inquired as to the name of the road. She said she did not know! She was 20 yards from her house and did not know the name of the road ¢ so funny!The mayor went on to explain to us that the median income for the village, it's called a village, is $24,000. A lot of the residents work in NYC and have between a 1-hour to several hour commute. The town is so small that mail is not delivered to each home ¢ the residents have to pick it up themselves at the post office. The mayor said that when the city folks move out here, they don't understand why the mail is not delivered to their house and it apparently makes for some very funny conversations.   Dick has been the mayor for 11 years and has decided to not seek reelection. As with any political position, there are folks who like the work being done and those who think otherwise, so after many years of service, he has decided it¢s time to quite fighting the battles, stressing over the issues and time to do something else. When our hosts found out that tomorrow was our wedding anniversary, they tried really hard to convince us to stay another day and celebrate. They even offered to make us a cake for the event! They suggested that we slack pack or hike 11 miles up the trail to Vernon where they would pick us up and bring us back to the house. We decided, though, that we just wanted to get back in the woods and back into our normal routine, so we declined their gracious offers. Tomorrow the town is having a parade in which the mayor rides in one of the parade cars. Grasshopper asked the mayor, ¢Which clown suit do you get to wear?¢ And he said, "What did you say?" And she said again, "Well, which clown outfit do you get to wear?" It finally dawned on him that she was pulling his leg, and he called her a smarty-pants, except he used a different term, which wasn't quite as polite.   Funny! At the conclusion of dinner, we were asked what time we wanted to leave in the morning. Of course, when we said that we were normally on the trail at 6:00, we received a lot of eyes rolling and chuckles. A 6:00 a.m. departure was just not going to fly. We eventually negotiated a 6:30 breakfast, a 7:15 pickup to the grocery store with Butch, and back on the trail shortly after that because again it's a 1 square mile town and it doesn't take that long to get from the grocery store to the trail head. The mayor had a request for us before we could go to bed for the night. He called us into the living room and explained to us that as his tradition dictates, he was going to share with us a opera aira, Nessun Dorma - Vincer2!, that he feels will be a great motivator for us for the remainder of our trip. He even told us that previous successful thru-hikers have written him that they sang the last lines from the aira, as they summitted Katahdin! Given that the song is sung in Italian, he explained the story behind it before playing it. The opera is about an unknown prince who falls in love at first sight with the beautiful but cold princess. Any man who wishes to wed the princess must first answer her three riddles. If he fails, he will be beheaded. The unknown prince has correctly answered the three riddles put to all of her prospective suitors. Nevertheless, she recoils at the thought of marriage to him. The unknown prince offers her another chance by challenging her to guess his name by dawn. Certain of victory, at the end of the song, the unknown prince sings, ¢Vincer2! Vincer2! Vincer2!¢, which translates to ¢I shall win. I shall win. I shall win.¢Listening to the song was a very emotional experience for Dick, as he sat back in his recliner, eyes closed with tears flowing down his cheeks. Although we will probably not remember the Italian word ¢Vincer2¢, I know that we can keep the ¢I shall win¢ words in our minds as we continue our adventure, especially during our tough times and hopefully as we summit Katahdin. About 9:00 we headed to the basement for bed, where we had the whole place to ourselves. Unfortunately, since Grasshopper had a caffeinated coke before dinner, there was no sleeping for her. At 11:00, still not able to get to sleep, she decided she needed to raid the refrigerator for strawberries! So at 11:00 at night, she stood in the middle of the mayors kitchen, in her hiking PJs, eating strawberries right out of the refrigerator container. It¢s tough to teach some folks social skills.Goodnight from the mayor¢s house in Unionville, NY.