Date: 2017-08-05
From: Sabbath Day Pond

To: Rangely
Miles today: 9.4
Weather: broken clouds

I woke up this morning to my 530 alarm, turned it off, and rolled over for another 30min of sleep. The 6am alarm was enough to rouse me and I slowly began getting ready to get moving. As I did I chatted with Alias, who by the time I was packed up and saddled up had yet to emerge from his sleeping bag. He was thinking he might wait out the rain.For the NOBOs we have a saying... "No pain, no rain, no Maine" which means if you don't hike through the pain, and you don't hike in the rain, you're not going to make it out of maine. I haven't decided if, for SOBOs, that last bit should read "you're not going to make it out of Maine" or if they should just go with "No pain, no rain, no Georgia". Either way, I was hiking today and I hit the trail just after 7am, walking back down to the pond and then heading north.Just because a section doesn't have any mountains doesn't mean its flat. Not by any means. At least in AWOL, the scale of the elevation plot hides a lot of little ups and downs which don't feel so little as you're going over them. My morning had a bunch of those, interspersed with boggy/muddy regions which had me hopping from root to root. Of course, eventually I missed a step and my (still not dry) shoe ended up in a mud puddle, but at least I could look forward to getting dry in town.I passed a group of girls speaking french and took a break at a campsite on a pond and called and setup my shuttle into town and hostel for the night. The last 4.8mi to the road came pretty easy and I was moving pretty fast, eager to get to town and a shower and laundry and eager to avoid the imminent rain. As I hiked towards the road I hit a beautiful section of trail... I don't mean that the scenery was beautiful, I mean the trail itself was beautiful (at least to my eyes). In what must've been a heroic feet of strength and persistence, the MATC trail crews had dug a drainage ditch along the trail and piled the soil up to raise the trail, in the process covering all the roots and rocks. For 100 glorious yards it felt like I was back on the nice flat, dirt trails of Virginia and I hit 3mph pace for a couple of seconds before that section ended and I was back to the uneven, root covered, muddy maine trails. It was nice while it lasted.A light sprinkle did begin to fall in my final mile but my yell of "Really?! 1/2 mile from town?!" convinced it otherwise and the weather held until I reached the road. My shuttle was there waiting for me and I hopped in and off we went to town. The driver was a hiker who had hiked from CT to ME from February to June of this year and so he relayed some stories of the trail in the winter months, feet of snow, constant snowstorms, etc. Finally we arrived at a large farmhouse (appropriately named the Farmhouse Inn) and I was shown the packroom, my bunk in the bunkroom, the hiker kitchen and common area and left to my own devices. I did notice in the log that Lookout was here 2 days ago... I'm not too far behind!I showered (as usually a little disgusted with the color of the initial water to wash off of me) and then hung out in the common area and kitchen, waiting for the 1pm shuttle to town. I ended up having some leftover hotdogs and corn from last night's cookout for someone's birthday and some cherries and strawberries that someone had left in the fridge for the hikers. The shuttle into town was pretty quick and stopped at the ice cream stand where I got out and headed to the library to use their computer to do a little planning for my finish. Spreadsheets are hard to manipulate on a phone... much easier on a computer. Next I headed up the laundramat to wash my clothes, and then up to the grocery store for my resupply. After shopping I headed out to the street and started hitching a ride back to the hostel, not wanting to walk with all my groceries. It didn't take long for me to get a hitch from a guy who apparently spent a good deal of his youth hitching as a mode of transportation. I didn't realize quite how close I actually was to the hostel since I had had a ride into town and had then walked to the grocery store... it turned out to only be about half a mile which I felt a little bad hitching.I organized my new food into my food bag and then hung out for the rest of the afternoon, just chilling on the couches and enjoying a couple of the ciders I had picked up at the store. The bunkhouse emptied out as the dinnertime shuttles left for town, leaving just me handing around. Soon enough 501 and 2 other section NOBOs wandered in, apparently having just woken up from a nap. They had picked up spaghetti, sauce, ground beef, and garlic bread at the store earlier and had volunteered that anyone who pitched in some food could partake in the communal dinner, so I had supplemented what they bought with some extra (to feed more hikers) on my trip to the store.In no time we had the pasta cooked, the beef browned and added to the warmed sauce, and the bread heated and dug in. We cooked basically everything we had bought and ended up with way too much (which was part of the plan), however all the rest of the hikers had gone into town to eat (which was not part of the plan), leaving just the 4 of us. We offered some to the hostel owners and the husband ended up taking us up on our offer and joined us for a bit. We stilled ended up with a ton of leftovers which we just threw in the fridge labeled "free'... they won't last long.