| Mile | 1282.2 |
| Miles Since Last Update | 19.4 |
| Day | 99 |
Shit day. Late start as I had to Uber from Lehighton which took forever. Scrambles today weren’t horrible but the rocks were still very slippery from the rain. All the water here is poisoned so I was carrying an extra two liters which made the pack heavier. I ate shit in a gravel parking lot next to a ski resort, nothing major but I reopened a cut on my leg that I got from the rollercoaster which bled a lot.
Pretty demoralized from all of that I gave up on fighting more rocks and just took a road walk to wind gap. Ends up being roughly the same mileage but my feet get torn up in a slightly different way (it is also faster and many times more dangerous than walking the trail). PA has me cheating a lot I guess which doesn’t feel great. That and tomorrow being day 100 has me thinking a lot about why I’m out here. I don’t really care about katahdin, this has never been some childhood dream of mine, and I’m not trying to write a fucking book or anything. I think I truly just wanted to put myself into an unfamiliar situation where I’d be deprived of many of the things I’d grown accustomed to, and see if I could adapt and make do with what little I had available. At this point it does feel like I’ve been pushed past some threshold in that space and I don’t really see what I accomplish if I’m just going to cheat thru the rest of the trail by road walking from one desolate town to the next.
All that being said I’m finishing out PA tomorrow. Maybe transitioning into a state that hasn’t sold every possible natural resource to coal/oil companies will renew some kind of drive in me to finish or at least go a little further. Maybe I will have time to think more about all this during the zero I have to take in order to get new shoes that I desperately need via Amazon (every outfitter for the next 200 miles is a canoe rental place that lists itself as an outfitter to draw people in, scum). The hotel I’m at now is right on the trail and on paper the path to Delaware Water Gap is very very easy, so maybe tomorrow will be less bad, but I’m not getting my hopes up.
