From Hazard’s notes:
Day 112: August 29, 2009
Travel:
From: Stratton, ME
To: ‘Zero Day’ Stratton, ME
Weather:
AM & PM: Rained all day as a tropical storm and front from the west blew through. Not a good day to hike.
People: White Wolf Inn owners, Strider, Braid. Crocstar & UCOC.
Animals: Nay
Money: $8 for breakfast, $10 to send a package home, $35 resupply, $2 for laundry, (dinner was on Croc b/c owed me $10 for room). $2019 cumulative.
Notes of the day:
AM: I woke up feeling like my body had been plowed through multiple brick walls. The feeling was shared amongst the other guys who were all slow moving this morning. We walked down the street to the Stratton Diner for our breakfast fix. I had a heaping portion of pancakes, eggs, sausage, and a muffin which satisfied me perfectly. After breakfast Croc and I walked up to the Post Office in a misty rain to collect Croc’s package and for me to send some unnecessary gear back home. The camera I asked my mom to send me was picked up on the way into town yesterday but my current camera was now back to working condition and the camera Croc expected to be at the post office to replace his with the broken screen didn’t make it. I took the memory card from the just sent camera and then shipped it and the loose gear back home. It wasn’t all loss for Croc because there were a few cookies and other assorted baked goods on the counter that we sampled before walking across the street to the library. At the library I checked my email, wrote a MUF post to let everyone know how we’ve progressed since I wasn’t trying to keep up with daily posts anymore, and I shuffled around my pictures to make room on my memory cards because space was slowly running out. This is also why there just aren’t many videos for the last half of the trip because I needed to save the space for pictures.
PM: The lady staffing the library kicked me out when the library closed around 12:30 pm. Crocstar had left much earlier to sort out his resupply situation, but when I got back to the room everyone was laying around watching TV. I kick started the resupply conversation by discussing with the guys the details of our schedule that would take us to Monson and then ultimately to Katahdin. What the reader may not realize is that in order to feel confident in buying the exact amount of food we have to hammer out a schedule we know we can stick to and make commitments to be in certain places on time. I guess this is the kind of all or nothing approach that helped us move up the trail as quickly as we have. For this resupply Spoon and I decided to move away from the model we have used the entire trip and agreed to handle breakfast and lunch on our own and only have a communal dinner. This allowed us to satisfy our personal cravings without affecting the others budget or pack weight. After picking up the goods and repackaging them into our food bags we needed to figure out how we were going to get our laundry done. Instead we all ended up getting wrapped up in watching “Liar, Liar” on TV blowing away a couple hours. Needless to say none of us were very motivated to get anything done today. After the movie Spoon asked someone at the Inn if we could use the washer but we were denied so I walked across the parking lot to the hostel and asked Susan if I could do a load of laundry for a reasonable price since we weren’t staying with her. I put up $5 and then went back to collect the guys and their clothes. While our clothes were churning we sat down for dinner at the Inn but the cook and owner were still not back from a wedding reception they catered that afternoon. We sat around for awhile in no hurry and asked for the remote to the big flat screen near our table and watched some TV and Spoon and Crocstar played chess with the pieces provided at the table. When everyone returned from the reception and the kitchen got fired up, I ordered one of those Wolf burgers that had bacon and a sausage patty on it. After dinner, my food induced coma made it so I couldn’t move very far from my bed and I passed out sometime around 9:00 pm.
