35 cent wings!

7-1-09 day 29
start: Fingerboard Shelter, NY
end: Hemlock Springs Campsite, NY
daily mileage: 16.3
total mileage: 381.9

Some more tough climbs today, but they were definitely still fun. We saw our first wild turkey off the trail!

The AT actually passes through a small zoo, so we spent some time in the "Bear Mountain Zoo" which rehabilitates injured animals. Many of the zoos cages were pretty smallish, and lots of the hikers going through reacted pretty negatively. All the animals were local (I guess porcupines and sea otters are around here?), and we saw a funny sight around the turkey vulture cage: he'd just been fed some carrion, and six or seven free turkey vultures from the mountains all landed around his cage to try to get some. So we have this picture of the free turkey vulture on the left, and the caged one on the right. We were comforted to realize, when we asked a zoo attendant, that they hadn't just escaped!

We were starving by the time we got to Fort Montgomery around dinner time (we had to do some grocery shopping), but lo and behold, we saw a restaurant with 35 cent wings on Wednesdays! We did some quick math, decided it was probably wednesday, and ran up. But no! It was closed! But yes! It opened in five minutes! In short, after a lot of emotional ups and downs, Travis and I each ate 25 wings, and are now feeling extremely fat and sassy. We hiked a bit farther into camp (no shelter tonight) and got poured on... but nothing can dampen our wing-induced euphoria.