6/22 Day 111 Inn at the Long Trail to Winturri Shelter 18 miles
Breakfast is the most important meal of the day, or so I'm told, so we ate an amazingly large complimentary breakfast at the Inn. Juice, coffee, pancakes, eggs, toast, and bacon--a lot of food for a girl my size but I ate every last bit. After getting our bellies good and full, we hung out with Nomad until check-out time. This will likely be our last time seeing Nomad on trail so hugs and goodbyes were a little sad. When we got back on trail, we encountered several day hikers. Surprisingly, most of the people we passed were aware of thru-hikers and all had questions and comments making our hike fairly slow. It felt good though, being acknowledged and complimented for being a thru-hiker; this section of the trail became our personal cheer block. The cheers soon ended, though, as the terrain got worse. We had no views, with nothing but pointless ups and downs, with hot and humid weather. The miles seemed to take forever but we made it to camp just before dark.
6/23 Day 112 Winturri Shelter to Happy Hill Shelter 20.4 miles
Today was a tough day. Again, it was hot and humid, which means muggy and buggy. The trail was muddy; the terrain more of just pointless ups and downs. Needless to say, this was not one of our favorite sections. We struggled to keep our spirits high but regardless of our moods, we kept hiking. For lunch we were too lazy to walk off trail to the shelter so we sat on our packs at the shelter trail entrance instead. It was here that we met our first SOBO who happened to be trying to complete an unsupported thru-hike in only 2 months; he made me feel like a slacker but I didn't care. Hiking huge miles every day, by yourself, did not sound fun to me. After our little break, we pushed on with hopes of finding cold drinks in town 4.8 miles away. We made good time making our way from the trail to the road and arrived in town extremely sweaty, moderately muddy, and assuredly a little stinky. There were people swimming in the river below a bridge as we passed, which looked very tempting, but our mind's were fixed on food and drink so we kept going until we reached the West Hartford Village Store and Deli. Then we sat in air conditioning with Corona for over an hour as we ate and drank until we were content. All the struggles of the day were forgotten, drowned with soda. When we finally decided it was time to get those last 4 miles in for the day, we didn't even care that it was raining again. We were just trying to get to camp before the thunderstorm hit, which we did with 5 minutes to spare. Only a section hiker was in the shelter so we bunked up next to him, drenched ourselves in bug spray, and fell asleep listening to the familiar sound of rain.
"Be still my heart; thou hast known worse than this."
Homer
