Zero day

Today was a rest day. After making coffee I swam for a while. Around noon I made mac and cheese for lunch. Then I hung my hammock in the shade high up on the bluffs overlooking the lake and read and napped until evening. There was a fence for safety but it did not slow down the strong north breeze that cooled me and kept the bugs away.

Around 7pm a lady from Vermont drove up and asked to share my site. All the other sights were taken she said. I moved my tent as far as possible but I imagine she could still here my snoring. She was too polite to yell over or throw anything to wake me if it bothered her. When hiking the Appalachian Trail there is little 3 sided shelters with a roof and floor. Most people prefer to sleep in them to save the time of packing up a tent in the morning. They usually say 6 or 8 people but no hiker would turn any one away so the saying is there is always room for one more. On one particularly cold and nasty night in the white mountains we were able to cram 19 hikers into one rated for 6. Anyway waking up in a shelter you can always tell who snored the worst by the amount of hiking boots that are piled up around an individual. Im digressing and don’t let me get started on trail stories! So her name was Melinda and she was on her way to Columbus. She gave me a peach and a tomato. And later she insisted I take ten dollars for the campsite. The campsites were $15. I refused at first, but then took the money gratefully. It will help get me back on budget.

At my warm shower host in Ripley 2 days back I was given the book BORN TO RUN. The host was an ultra runner and had done dozens of marathons. He also did a few 50 milers. His time for the ultra long ones were better then what my time is for the same distance on my bike. Very impressive! The book ended up being impossible to put down and I finished it tonight. I passed the book on to Melinda who had expressed interest in it.

As I was slicing the tomatoes Melinda had given me, the man at the site next to mine brought over a loaf of bread and Italian sausages and gave them to me! My planned dinner was peanut butter on tortillas as I’m real low on food. But as it turned out dinner was better then I could of imagined.

On May 9th before the first part of my trip I reset my odometer to 0. It now reads 2,279. I have been 651 miles since my last day off the bike.