My birthday!

8-24-09 day 83

start: Lake Shore House in Monson, ME

end: Long Pond Stream Lean-To, ME

daily mileage: 15.1

total mileage: 1066.3

Today is my birthday, hooray! The big 2-2. After the celebration the night before, we let ourselves sleep in a little bit and got a bit of a late start, but not too bad. We're carrying about 5 days of food through the 100 mile wilderness, which is slightly more than normal but really not too heavy. It's fun entering the 100 miles- feels kind of like we're leaving the last frontier town for the wild west or something.

We got a hitch from a kindly vacationing german family, in the US for the first time. They were very friendly, though it seemed like an unlikely demographic to pick up hitch hikers- I'm not sure I would if vacationing for the first time in a different country! But we made it to the official trail head and started hiking. We soon passed a sign that warned us that we were entering the 100 mile wilderness, and told us that we needed a minimum of 10 days of food to enter! We have 5. Fingers crossed!

We met up with Whisp (who'd gotten an earlier start), and started hiking with him- as we're on the same schedule, we're pretty much hiking together for the rest of the journey. We cut the day a little bit shorter than planned (despite knowing we'd have to make up that mileage the next day) because of our late start. We stopped for lunch at a beautiful waterfall, and celebrated my birthday by having not 1 Jolly Rancher each for our after-lunch dessert, but 2! Same at dinner! It was a great birthday.