Today's Miles: 12.1
Total Miles: 833.3
The mornings are getting so much colder, but at least I'm getting better at doing everything in my sleeping bag before finishing my packing up. I waited on Doc and Chaco, and we ended up hiking most of the day together.
We crossed into New Jersey early this morning, and as always, it feels good to be in a new state. When we crossed a road, we met a hiker named Wings who had started in Georgia this year but had to get off for school. She is now section hiking some parts of the trail in this area. Her mother was dropping her off and offered us peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. We happily accepted and stopped to talk to them for a while. After lunch, we came to a fairly flat section that we hiked together through. We were playing the animal guessing game, where someone picks an animal and the others try to guess what it is. Doc was in front, I was in the middle, and Chaco was in the back. All of a sudden, she starting yelling and cursing and ran past us both. She was being attacked by ground bees. We had no idea what was going on as she struggled to get her pack off and then starting losing the rest of her clothes in an attempt to get the bees off of her. There were 4 or 5 of them in her shorts, socks, and on her arm. She was stung probably a dozen times. Doc tried to help her nurse her wounds some, and I felt pretty bad even though we couldn't help but laugh after. She was definitely convinced to go into town after that encounter and made sure to blame Doc and me for stirring up the bees before she passed through.
We had one small mountain to climb, and the ascent was great. The descent wasn't so great though. It was incredibly rocky, and there were a ton of day hikers out. I think I saw more day hikers today than I have on the entire trail so far. It took a little while to get down, and Doc had already gone ahead so he could try to get a hitch into town. Three is a hard number to hitch with. There was a point at the bottom of the mountain where two trails split. One was nice and covered in pine needles; the other was filled with small rocks. Guess which one was the AT. The rocky one, of course. We took that route because we weren't sure they would end at the same place. They did, so we were obviously a little annoyed. It was followed by a nice walk through a field, however, before coming to the road. Chaco and I headed out to hitch and were picked up by two very nice women pretty quickly despite it being a terrible spot to do so. There wasn't much of a shoulder to pull off on. We are staying at the church hostel in Vernon that allows hikers to stay for a donation and a chore. It was nice to do laundry and shower since it's been a while since I've had clean clothes. I was able to resupply and do all the other good town stuff. I'm hoping I can get a good night's sleep. It's been a while since that's happened. I've been sleeping very restlessly lately. I've been having a lot of pain in my knee too, so maybe the shorter day will help that out some as well.
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