Day 128
We woke up early from our stealth camp due to the sunrise over the hill. It was a beautiful morning, but my stomach was still killing me. We hiked up a hill this morning to a field, which was soaking wet with dew and filled with mud. I took a wrong step and went up halfway to my knees in mud. I was so glad to not have lost a shoe! We climbed two steep hills, both with balds and views, before coming down to Cloudland Road. We walked up to Cloudland Farms Market to see they were closed. We sat on the porch for several minutes when the owner came and opened up. We bought homemade ice cream and homemade sodas (!) and happily consumed them on the porch. We then made the decision to walk the roads by the farms to see if it looked any better than the trail this morning. Google maps showed us the way and would add mileage to our trip, but our time would be cut down. We started out up the road to a road called Old King’s Hwy. It turns out, this road had been there since 1763 and was historic! We walked past tons of beautiful old farms and cemeteries, saw a few newts, and then talked to a few locals before coming back on trail at Joe Ranger Road. We continued onward toward West Hartford and walked the trail (a paved road) down into town ad to Full Belly Deli. Dirty Girl, Bird Kicker, and Bottlecap were all there. We had lunch and then, since bad weather was coming, decided to wait out the storm under the bridge at the White River. There are two blue blazes on the bridge where it’s deep enough to jump off, so we watched people jump off the bridge all day. The bad weather never came, just lots of lightening and a 15-minute sprinkle of rain, so we decided to head up the hill to Happy Hill Shelter. We had four hills between us and the shelter and we felt them all! The trail was nice and soft pine needles though, so it wasn’t too bad. We got to the shelter fairly quickly and met Lone Duck, two section hikers, and then Golden, Trekking Pole, and two SOBOs showed up as well. We had a wonderful evening with great conversation. The photo today is the dew in the grass at our stealth site.