Day 92
We woke up at 3:30 this morning to a hellacious storm! I heard lots of zippers flying and hikers telling trying to get their rain flies on their tents before their gear got too wet. The thunderstorms were insane and hit twice before chilling out around 7 am. We all dried out our gear best we could and got a little later start. We had a short 9 miles into Port Clinton. We walked and walked and noticed a lot of mistakes in our guidebooks. A lot of the milestones and elevation profiles were incorrect, making the humid and hot morning seem a lot longer than usual. We climbed a steep hill and were sweating pretty heavy. We took several breaks before finally coming to the 1100-foot straight down hill walk into Port Clinton. Nokey was moving fast and kept on going straight down. I tried to bypass a few rock steps due to knee pain and ended up falling down all of them! We got to the gravel road that was about 9/10 the way down the hill and we hear yelling from the other side of the river “NOKEY!” it was so weird to hear, so we ran down rest of the hill to find Dances with Flies, Feathers, Wild Turky, Q-tip, and Rainman! Flies was shocked he yelled to us and we were up the hill. He was just yelling because he had heard we were close by! We all walked into Port Clinton together and went to eat lunch at the Port Clinton Hotel. Nokey and I had planned on taking a long break and hiking out, but the heat warning hit and the day got hotter and hotter. It was a heat index of 105 degrees and the sun was relentless. We decided to just stay in town at the hiker pavilion with everyone, as well as Otto, DK and Big E. it was Q-tip’s last night on the trail, so we all had a bit of a hiker party and called it a later night. We are hoping for some rain and a cooler day tomorrow.