Date: 2014-09-10
From: Spaulding Mtn

To: ME 27
Miles today: 13.5
Weather: overcast clouds

Excuse the bland day by day explanation thing that's becoming a norm for these final journal entries. Making very little time to write as the days are getting shorter. Not enough time and calories to put in some extra thought or style but I promise I'll edit, update, and consolidate all these entries into one easy to read and uninterrupted flow when I get home.The nights have been dropping into the 40s and I have still been sticking to my 45 bag. Have not been cold overnight even though I tend to leave my tent flap open to avoid condensation. I'm sure some colder nights are coming up before the journey is over but decided to just tough it out instead of switching back to my 20 degree bag. Grabbed an emergency blanket out of a hiker box and will sleep in my rain gear if the temperature drops into the 30s. I've got to use this rain gear sometime! I carried this stuff most of the way and haven't bothered to use it when it rained. Mostly used it while while doing laundry.Today is to town day. Only 13.5 miles to the road for Stratton. Decided not to cook breakfast because that normally results in me taking a total of 2 hours to leave camp lately so I killed the rest of some trail mix. Ended up taking 2 hours anyway talking to other hikers and didn't leave until 8am. Cliff bars and Mojo bars were my only substance intake for the day as I hiked because I didn't feel like stopping for long to cook. For that reason I did not keep leap frogging with Tigger, Landslide, and Styles. The trail was loosening up in terms of brutality - there was only one particularly steep downhill part and I didn't have to ford any streams because the water was low. I get to Stratton and the only people I see out on the street is a handful of thru hikers sitting on a corner day drinking and waving at every car that passes by. Let me back up a minute, got to the road and discovered a sectioner trying to hitch. He was out there for over an hour which I thought was unbelievable. I confidently informed him it shouldn't take more than 10 minutes. He was an older guy, yellow shirt, and harmless looking which may have made him look creepy. Strange how that works. We ended up getting a ride within 10 minutes anyway like I promised. Muahaha.The first objective upon getting into town was getting my hands on the famous wolf burger but the restaurant was closed. Didn't open until 4pm so I joined the hiker trash parade for a bit then broke off to clean up. By the time I got a wolf burger I was drooling. Could be the best burger I've ever had in my life. Being a thru hiker definitely is a factor though so there's a potential for situational bias. Irregardless... Fantastic burger. Hot Sauce completely splooged in this town and ate 2 of these 8oz burgers, desert, and more. Before shoveling that stuff in he had a 2L Pepsi, Gatorade, and dived into a 30 pack of Budweiser. If he didn't drink so much beer, he would have had 3 Wolf Burgers.Later ran into Stormy and she said this town was totally empty last night minus her and a couple other hikers. Tonight we have a mini bubble of people in and we just spent a good 30 minutes marveling at the insane amount of spiders crawling all over the second level of the Wolf Inn. Not knocking on the place, it's just the outside balcony has the most dense population of spiders any of us has ever seen. Everywhere you looked had spiders and if you looked closely you'd see them having sex or females eating males. Crazy cool stuff. Made a hiker or two very uncomfortable when people started pooling money together to see me eat the biggest one we saw. I didn't do it and truthfully no one wanted to see it. Yet... They were willing to throw down a collective $10 to make it happen. Sleeping early to determine whether or not I'm taking a rain day tomorrow. Either way I'm getting sleep while I can before the crowd comes in or I have to sleep lightly in my tent.