thru it all hostel to ironmasters mansion hostel

today may have been the easiest day on trail yet. the weather was spectacular (at least for hiking). it was cool and dry and not particularly sunny. the trail itself was wide and for the most part flat.

rocket, maestro, and i left the hostel a little after 07:00. rocket left his poles (a pretty regular occurrence) and had to go back to get them. we hiked the .8 mile to where the trail crossed the road. from there we split up according to our hiking speeds.

i ended up doing 10 miles before 10:00, which when starting after 07:00 is somewhat astounding. i stopped at birch run shelter for a snack and to let rocket and maestro catch up. we hiked together for a couple miles to the halfway point.

maestro queued up bon jovi’s livin’ on prayer, because “we’re halfway there”. from there it was a little further to the 1100 mile marker, and then a little further still to an old but much more grand halfway marker.

rocket and i hiked pretty close the rest of the afternoon. we opted to skip lunch in anticipation of the half gallon challenge. (more on that later)

we arrived at ironmasters mansion hostel and checked in. maestro arrived a while later and we went next door picpine grove furnace store for the half gallon challenge.

the half gallon challenge is you eat a half gallon of ice cream (so a quart followed by a pint) and if you eat it all, you get a tiny wooden tasting spoon with “member of half gallon club” written on it in sharpie. to ne honest this isn’t much of a challenge for me, but i was looking forward to it none the less.

unfortunately when we got there they had only 3 flavors of ice cream left, strawberry (not a fan), orange sherbert (not ice cream), and neapolitan (lame). apparently they get restocked on tuesdays and since the weather was hot they were low on flavors. i ended up choosing not to participate. instead i got some mint chocolate chip ice cream scooped for me, from the “premium” ice cream cooler (for ice cream cones).

rocket and maestro decided to participate. both of them finished without incident except that both of them were so cold by the end that their hands were shaking so badly it looked like they had parkinson’s.

we headed back to the hostel for showers. there was a rumor that one shower was bad, and i’m afraid i picked that one. it was abysmal. a trickle of water that never got warm, by the end i was as cold as rocket and maestro eating their ice cream.

i put on my puffy and crawled in bed to warm up and had a nice video chat with magz.

some additional images from today (all trail):