Date: 2005-07-03
From: Unionville, N.Y.

To:  Vernon, New Jersey St. Mark's Episcopal Church
Miles today: 11.8

We took our time this morning getting packed up and ready to move because the Horler¢s Grocery Store didn¢t open until 7 and we wanted to stop there and get coffee, sandwiches, and breakfast and stuff. So we were up early but we just kind of hung out and walked over to Horler¢s and asked the lady there to make us a couple of subs for lunch. You would have thought that we were trying to steal her kids or something. She made it very clear that she was not happy to be making subs at 7 in the morning, like she was giving them away or something.   We packed them up. We got out of there and started walking and I will finish this later. Looks like we¢re going to get a ride. Later... As I was saying, the lady behind the counter at Horler¢s Grocery in Unionville was being extremely unfriendly because she just couldn¢t believe that someone was asking her to make subs at 7 in the morning and gave us a bad attitude about it. Regardless, we did get the subs, and drinks we went ahead and walked up the hill to the Trail and started walking.Now, last night when Vern came in, we spent some time patching up his feet and this morning as well, trying to get bandaids on them. I gave him my two extra pairs of liners for him to try out instead of him wearing his heavy Smart Wool socks, but this was evident pretty quickly that this was not going to work out. He started out okay in the morning, but by eleven o¢clock he was starting to limp pretty badly again. We¢d slowed down to like 2 miles an hour, and by one o¢clock we had still only done twelve miles and he was just going out of his mind saying there was no way he was going to be able to keep hiking like this because his feet were continuing to get trashed. We went down at New Jersey 94. We went ahead down to the Heaven Hill Farm and got a couple of Cokes and ice cream and sat down outside to discuss what options we had with the problem with his feet. The Ridge Runner was there and we asked him. I tried to kind to yogi him but he was not having anything to do with with that. He was walking out of town and the best he could suggest was to call Dave at St. Mark¢s Episcopalian Church, the guy who runs the hostel there and see if he would give us a ride.I tried calling Desparado and got basically the same thing there. The best advice he could give me was to call the hostel and see if Dave would give us a ride. We tried calling CampMor to see if maybe they could pick us up. They are about 40 minutes away in Paramus, New Jersey to see if they would shuttle us in to get shoes but, they were closed because it¢s a Sunday. And to make matters worse, it is Sunday, July the third, and a lot of people are going to be closed.I tried calling Mike and Estee to see if maybe their friend at Bear Mountain might try to give us a ride somewhere, and we couldn¢t quite connect with them either so, at about 2:00 we finally gave up. Vern said ¢screw it, let¢s just start walking¢ so that¢s what we did. We got back up the road, started walking back up the Trail. I met this other couple coming southbound who asked us if we were through hikers. I recognized him right away. His trail name is LWOP. In the last three years I¢ve met him at least three times. Maybe four times. Once in the Smokies in 2003. Last year before Neels Gap on that short run. And this time. I¢m pretty sure I met him earlier this year also. But anyway, I was not shy about it. I said ¢I know you.¢ We talked a couple of minutes and then I asked him if he could give us a ride anywhere to get shoes. WalMart. The shoe store. Anywhere. He agreed to do that very generously. We were in desparate sorts and he understood that being a through hiker himself. So, he and his wife ran us up to the WalMart in Franklin, New Jersey and hung around. He had also given us some Pepsis too, by the way. He hung around for as long as it took us to go shopping. Vern finally ended up picking out a pair of sneakers and some insoles to go with it, and a bottle of alcohol to try and clean his feet and get them dried out with alcohol. I picked up a pair of sunglasses and some batteries. LWOP (that¢s Leave With Out Pay, by the way) took us back, gave us a choice of where to go, and by this time it was four o¢clock. We decided to just go ahead to the hostel in Vernon, New Jersey at St. Mark¢s Episcopalian Church. Really nice hostel. This is about as good as it gets on the trail. Extremely clean, tons of room to sleep in the Rec Room downstairs. It was sectioned off with accordion shutters in three sections which came in handy, because I slept in one section by myself and shut the accordians to try and minimize the damage of my snoring later on in the night. Everything in there is basically free or next to nothing. Fridge full of sodas, kitchen to use, good shower, good bathrooms, and laundry facilities. And we did all of that. Did laundry and took a shower.Gazelle and Skootch, who we had met the day before, were also there. They are section hikers doing about 700 miles of the trail. They are Mother/Daughter. Gazelle is the daughter, Skootch is the Mom. And then this other gentleman who is also section hiking that I met, who I can¢t remember his name, but I met him a couple of days ago. There were just five of us there that night.Vern and I got our laundry done, got our showers and went to the pizza place in town and ate some pizza, then went shopping at the A&P store. We brought back breakfast for the morning. Of course, I got a couple of the Hershey¢s Vanilla Cream milkshakes and a hoagie for lunch tomorrow. We kind of sat around and talked for a while and then we went to bed.