Pinkham Notch Visitor’s Center 1874.9 (zero miles, 849.5 total miles)
I slept very well in the Airbnb, and got to sleep in till just after 7AM. Catchup had been nice enough to grab breakfast ingredients at Walmart the day before, and made a killer breakfast for us in the morning.
While he made breakfast, I got my new earbuds and charging cord situated, as well as switched out my phone screen protector and case. My phone had gotten quite dirty from being in the woods all the time, and a new case was certainly in order.
We ate thick slices of bacon, crescent rolls, and fried eggs seasoned with nutmeg and paprika, topped with pepper jack cheese and slices of avocado. Catchup used to work in a breakfast cafe, so that was his specialty, and I certainly enjoyed and appreciated it.
We cleaned the kitchen and did dishes, before lounging around watching several episodes of Rick & Morty on the living room TV.
It was so nice to have a day just to totally relax and chill out. Double zeros are a gift for that reason, and today really felt like a Sunday, even though it was Tuesday.
We finished the leftover steak and mashed potato pizza for lunch, then went to hang out at the Androscoggin River, which flowed behind the house.
I took some time to read up on the river, and discovered it only flows through New Hampshire and Maine, and is a tributary of the Kennebec River, which we will be crossing by ferry during our hike in the not too distant future.
It was a lovely day weather wise, in the mid 70s and partly cloudy. We’d had a lot of hot days recently, which did feel cooler than they were due to the increased elevation.
It looked like we would have a nice, warm day tomorrow as well for the Wildcat Mountain Range we would be traversing.
The Wildcats are well known for being a very difficult area of hiking, and Halfway had said it was like boulder climbing for much of it.
I remember quitting my hike right after the Wildcats at Route 2, and that they took us a day longer than we thought.
I am a much stronger hiker now, but it will be interesting and probably very significant for me to hike past that point, into totally unknown terrain until Katahdin.
I’ve been to many of the Maine trail towns, but haven’t hiked any of the Appalachian Trail in that state. I’m very excited for the new experiences it will hold, and Maine is always mentioned as one of the top states on the AT.
We’ve all heard the terrain gets a lot more rugged in Maine, and the trail is more overgrown. We have Mahoosuc Notch in a few days, which is the hardest and slowest mile on the AT. Catchup and I are both weirdly excited for that.
At the river, we met our Airbnb hosts, who had just moved to the area last year from California, and were loving being in New Hampshire full time.
While they worked on the garden and planted trees on the property line, we sat in the Adirondack chairs they had provided and talked while watching the river flow.
We dipped our feet and legs in the water, which felt particularly good on my joints, then had a backyard yoga session, which was lovely for my body as well.
Later on, we walked to Scoggins Cool Shack for ice cream (they had three different flavors of moose tracks and a moose mascot out front – we were definitely almost in Maine).
We passed Pineapples on the street walking to the Chinese buffet down the road. He’d done the 21 mile slack and said it and the rest of the Whites had definitely been hard on his legs.
Catchup made a delicious hash from the rest of the eggs and leftover bacon and fries from the Pub House for dinner. We ate that and the ice cream while watching Forgetting Sarah Marshall, one of my favorite movies.
It had been a really nice couple days off, and though we hadn’t planned on it, were glad we’d had the time to rest and recover.
Neither of us could wait to see Sunshine the next morning. She’d be arriving with her dad, and he would take us all to the trailhead to start the day with the Wildcats.
I was excited for our reunion, and to get hiking again. I was glad I hadn’t felt the way I had in Lincoln, and thought that showed some growth of being more flexible with my hike and my ego.
I still had plenty of time to hit Harpers Ferry before the suggested date of September 1st. The good thing is Springer Mountain never closes, unlike Katahdin, so there are no hard deadlines to finish the trail down south.
The very nature of a flip flop is flexibility in timing, so it only makes sense that I can pick up that lesson along the way and learn to relax a bit and not try to control everything. I feel like I might be getting there.