See What Living Like This Does To You?

… I had the Bo Jackson hip flexor thing going on with my left side today, which interests me. My right shin only hurt a little though. I guess at this point it’s not if you’re in pain but how much and where. So it was good to remember the words of [local legend skater] Craig Cassell-- “I don’t like the idea of my body telling me what I can or can’t do.”

I say that my stay in Kent [CT] was only “fair” because it was not without its disappointment. I did 30 [miles] yesterday and got there at 5pm, and I went to the hostel straightway to see what the deal was but I could find noone. Seeing that my knocks on the various doors were finding no purchase, a man looking not unlike G. Gordon Liddy came to help. It turns out that he goes there [it’s a church], though he says things like “I was thanking the Lord that I got the damn thing started.” It is an Episcopal church. So he wants to hike the trail when he retires in a couple years, and since he liked talking to us he invited Ranger Rick and me to shower and launder at his place and then go out to eat. This is all well and good, but you have to understand that heretofore it had been a crappy day and all I wanted in town was to get Oreos and milk and to sit down and read. That and that alone was my reason to keep moving, keep taking that next step.

You’ve already figured out what happened.

By the time we got done with all those things everything was closed and I couldn’t get my Oreos and milk. It put me in such a bad mood that I didn’t even call home. See what living like this does to you? It makes you want and crave the simplest things, and it makes you inordinately upset if you don’t get them-- so upset that you don’t even want to call home.