Date: 2023-10-04
From: East Branch Lean-To

To: Antler Campsite
Miles today: 16.1

Today we set off on the earlier side in order to make the food drop, and I was doing great mileage with an easy 2.7-3mph pace across gorgeous, flat, wide trail in a beautiful forest. At last I AM A HIKER speed-wise (for the record, this is all in my head and you don't need to meet a specific speed limit to be a thruhiker). We took a break at the Cooper Brook Falls lean-to to swim and chill for an hour, and it was GORGEOUS with the fall colors and the swimming hole. After that we hiked to Jo Mary road and got there by 2:15, a full 45 minutes before the food drop off (killing it). We talked to Curious George while we all cooked a leisurely lunch, and very generously he allowed me to charge my phone on his power bank while he was eating lunch. It was past the arranged drop-off time and we were wondering where Poet was with our food, so I checked my text conversation to make sure it was clear I wanted it changed to today - and Rabbit agreed it was. So we shrugged and said we would wait until 3:30-3:40 to text them on the Garmin. 3:30 comes and I painstakingly type out a message on the crappy tiny Garmin interface to Hippie Chick and did a dance to summon a satellite to send the message. 10 minutes later she replies super apologetically that she didn¢t realize there had been a date change (yesterday I had asked to change it to tomorrow aka today) and that she could send someone asap to get there at 5:30(!!!!!!) so I replied ¢yes pls :(¢ and we settled down to wait¢¦ for hours. We walked along the road, did a fake western-style showdown on the bridge, I read, and we languished in despair. I went to dig a hole and by the time I came back Poet was there looking sheepish with our food. He charged us $94 bucks for 4 freeze dried meals and 6 snackbars and we were thinking ¢this is a highway robbery¢ but paid and repacked our food bag, relieved to finally have food and not have to stealth camp at the road overnight. Honestly the only really annoying part was that he didn't even offer to give us anything as a 'thank you' for not being annoyed about being stranded without food (we literally had one bag of instant potatoes between us that we could have needed to stretch until the next day if we had no way to contact them) and that would be fine except he acted like the sodas he brought us were such a kind repayment WHEN IT WAS INCLUDED WITH THE $90 WE PAID FOR GETTING IT DROPPED OFF. Sigh. Unfortunate but at least we didn't starve. I drank one of the precious root beers, and Rabbit kindly packed out the other. At 5:50pm (nearly 3 hours since the pre-arranged food drop time) we finally headed out to our campsite 4.7 miles away. In the dark we had to do 2 sketchy river crossings over fallen logs, and bushwhack up and down river to find rocks to hop across on. We finally stumbled into camp, set up our tents, and I ate one of the terrible Greenbelly high calorie meal replacement snack bars and Rabbit¢s leftover risotto as we watched Jupiter rise over the water and I saw a shooting star!!! Then I crawled into bed, dicked on my phone as the campsite randomly had full bars commensurate with front-country level cell service, and went to bed at 10:30.