Day 106: Memorial

Day 106

Kent, CT to Pine Swamp Brook Shelter

Miles Hiked: 17.0

AT Milage: 1486.1

This morning I woke up at Amaya’s house and got ready for the trail. I’ve been having issues getting my blog posts to upload with pictures and I realized it is because I ran out of storage on the free version of WordPress. For some reason WordPress will not let me upgrade my account from my phone. Amaya let me use her computer so I could fix the problem which was awesome! Otherwise you might not be reading this post for another week or so. Part of my blog upgrade includes a free domain name for one year. I changed my website url to deshikesthru.blog. If you type in the old address of deshikesthru.wordpress.com it should still direct you to the same page. Before I got on trail, Amaya’s husband got us breakfast of bacon, egg, and cheese sandwiches from a local place. It was a great way to start the day.

Back on trail at 9am, I felt super lazy and was struggling with the new weight from my resupply of food. Every time I resupply my food it feels incredibly heavy for the first day. After that first day, it still feels heavier but my body will adjust to the weight. I was eating some of my food as fast as I could so that my pack would weigh less.

I took a break every 2-4 miles the entire day. It took me until 7:30pm to get to camp even tho it wasn’t a long day. Some of the trail walked right next to the Housatonic River, which was nice and flat. One of the places I took a long break at was called Silver Hill Campsite. It had a nice wooden porch swing that I sat on for a long time while I ate more food and called my mom. I wanted to stay at the camp, but I knew I would be happier the next day if I pushed on to the shelter. I planned on picking up my new shoes in town the next day so I had to make sure I was close enough to hike to town before the post office closed.

At the shelter, I arrived as it was getting dark outside. There was one tent set up and one person in the shelter. The person in the shelter introduced himself to me as “Memorial”. Memorial is hiking the AT in memorial of his wife of 18 years who passed away six years ago. Hiking the AT was a life goal of hers that she never got to do, so Memorial is fulfilling that goal in her memory. He told me that he has visited every single shelter on the whole AT so far and signed the log book. I have been seeing his entries in the journals and it took me a while to realize that someone was hiking the trail in memory of someone else. I think its cool he goes so far out of his way to make sure he visits every shelter. Some of the shelters are a mile off the trail so that is an extra two miles of walking!

Happy Trails!