johnson, vt

two town days in a row. awesome.

so we managed to delay hiking until about 530 last night, and then walked 3.4 miles to a pond on top of the smuggler's notch ski mountain...which was awesome. then we explored the warming hut .1mi away, to find it filled with garbage and totally disgusting (although someone did bring a large amount of rope and hang a couch from the ceiling...that was interesting). so we decided to cowboy out on the top of the ski hill, and had only been settled in for, maybe, 10 minutes, when i thought i saw lightening out of the corner of my eye...we all know how i feel about that.

so i stared at the horizon for 15 minutes or so, and saw nothing, gave up and decided to get back to getting to sleep, when john thought HE saw lightning. so then we BOTH stared at the horizon until we were able to confirm that neither of us was crazy, and we both saw lighening at the same time. and then we packed up our stuff and night hiked to the .3 miles to the nearest shelter, which was a fee site ($5 each). sort of a bummer, especially considering it didn't rain at all overnight, and we had to shell out $10 to sleep on the floor of a pretty crummy shelter, listen to mice eat the caretaker's food, and the section hiker's snoring.

oh, but then the caretaker said he would make us pancakes for breakfast as a special thru-hiker trail magic treat...which he did, but we had to wait around for nearly an hour for him to wake up (which was a bummer, given our desire to start hiking early and beat the heat), and then add to that, they were probably the grossest pancakes ever created and consumed by a human being (i venture to guess...i imagine if ever worse pancakes were created, they were most certainly not consumed but rather turned into trash or compost as they rightfully deserved to be).

in any event, we managed to climb the two small mountains in our way and make it down to johnson, vt, where we have so far spent about 2 hrs trying desperately to avoid the heat and eat food. guess how hot!? keep in mind, this is vermont, and practically canada:

94

yup. that's only 4 degrees colder than blue ridge parkway death heat.

on the plus side, tuesday is apparently the coolest day ever to be in johnson, because there is a farmer's market at 4, then a free open mic concert at 630, then bluegrass at the local pub/pizzeria in the evening.

oh, and we're only 50 miles from canada.