Cooking with Rum

This morning, I woke up at the Doyle Hotel after a fairly terrible night's sleep. One of the challenges at the hotel was that the rooms all have what I think are called transom windows. They’re basically these rectangular windows above the doors. And they let in a lot of light from the hallway. The bed wasn’t all that comfortable to start with, and then the room was flooded with light all night. So, not very conducive to a good night's sleep.

Nonetheless, I'm glad I stayed at the Doyle, because it's such an institution. So I can now say that I hiked in, had a beer, and stayed at the Doyle. Done.

I didn't have to get up terribly early, because the breakfast place across the street didn't open until 7 a.m., but I got there right at 7, and I was right behind Boots with the Fur. So we sat together at the breakfast counter. The place was a complete throwback joint that was playing country music and looked like it hadn’t been updated since 1965. The common theme around Duncannon seems to be that it's been lost in time, which I find fairly charming. There seem to be a lot of towns in rural Pennsylvania that are like that.

I ordered coffee, some eggs, and pancakes, and the pancakes turned out to basically be the size of dinner plates. I got two of them and wasn’t able to even finish them. I paid the check and was back on the trail by about 8:40.

The AT enters Duncannon from the south and continues all the way through the town. I guess the Doyle is maybe about a third of the way into the town. After that, the trail continues on through a residential area for quite a while. And this is basically because Duncannon sits close to two rivers, which means the trail has to go over two different bridges.

The first one is over the Juniata River, and the other is over the Susquehanna. And that one has a fairly large highway on it. There's a walkway adjacent to the highway, which is very un-AT-like, but once you cross the Susquehanna, the regular trail isn't too far away. There are a couple of service roads and some train tracks, and then you're back in the action.

I can't really find a good way of describing the geology of it, but the mountains tend to be very steep and long in Pennsylvania. It's kind of like corduroy, if that makes any sense. You go up a steep ridge, and then you walk along that ridge. So any time you either leave a town or enter a town, you’re facing a pretty significant incline or decline to get off, or back up to, that ridgeline. That's the general gist of Pennsylvania. Steep climbs, followed by very rocky ridges.

Unfortunately, today, the weather was very, very humid, and it was much warmer than it’s been in the past. So that affects the hiking, of course, but getting up the steep part wasn't all that terrible. Frankly, I'd rather go up something steep that has a smooth trail than hike a path that's fairly flat but has a lot of rocks to navigate — which was the case yesterday.

At 8 miles in, I got to a road crossing and a parking lot where people can access the trail. And a nice older couple was there, offering some Trail Magic, which was very welcome. Boots with the Fur was already there, as well as a guy named Zigzag, whom I’d also seen at breakfast. I don't expect to see much more of Zigzag. He's very fast and does a lot of miles. I just happened to cross paths with him briefly. He actually did the four state challenge in less than 14 hours, which I find completely insane.

There was also a guy from Austria named Terminator that I believe I've met before. He’s a very nice guy, and he sounds just like Werner Herzog, so I just want to listen to him talk all the time. The lady giving out Trail Magic was telling us about her banana bread — which tasted amazing — and how she puts rum in it to liven it up a little bit. So Terminator chimed in with his Werner Herzog accent and said, “I’ve heard this expression — ‘I like to use rum when cooking, and sometimes it even goes into the food.’” He thought that was pretty amusing.

[Wife note: Let’s all just pretend this is a picture of the nice lady’s banana bread and not a stock pic I had to download…]

And then there was one other guy — his name reminded me of “car key something,” but I didn't catch it. He decided to hike the trail only about a month before he started. He was overweight, and when he started hiking, his metric was that he would continue until he lost 70 pounds or had hiked for 120 days, whichever came second. So, he hasn't been on the trail for 120 days yet, I think just 100 days, but he's already lost 60 pounds.

So maybe he'll lose those last 10 pounds by the 120-day mark, but who knows? He's not actually planning on hiking the whole trail. He was just very purpose-driven about losing some weight. He looks great. I would suspect he's in his 60s. So, kudos to him.

After Trail Magic, I had about another 8 miles to go, and after 3 miles, I came to the Peter's Mountain Shelter. The water source at the shelter was 300 steps directly down, and — obviously — 300 back up. But the really nice Trail Magic couple knew that, so they’d brought a bunch of gallons of water with them so we could all fill up there instead. And I was more than happy to just completely load myself down with water. But to my amazement, not many of the other hikers did. Lots of people don't like to carry water, but personally, I'd rather carry water an extra 3 miles than have to go up and down 300 steps to get it.

Some hikers chose to stop and stay at Peter’s Mountain Shelter, including Terminator, but I continued on for 5 more miles to a tent site, because I already had water and didn’t need to be near a source. And as soon as I got to the site, I started hearing some thunder rumbling. The site actually had good cell reception, so I was able to check the weather radar and saw that a huge storm was coming our way.

There was a guy already at the tent site when I got there, named Strider, just having a snack. He’d told me he was going to continue on, because it wasn't that late, maybe 5 o'clock, but when I showed him the radar, he immediately started setting up his tent.

And he was being very particular about where he put his tent. He told me how earlier in his hike, on May 26 — which I think is the day I was on a ridge and took a short video of the storm I was in — he was south a little bit, and he later found out that he was in the middle of a tornado. During that storm, a big branch fell and nicked him. Thankfully, it didn't hit him directly, but it nicked him. If he’d been just a couple inches over, he could have been in really big trouble. So, he's understandably fairly paranoid now about where the trees are and where he sets up his tent.

He ended up putting his tent up very close to mine, which was suboptimal for both of us, because you generally want a little distance between tents, but, you know, safety first. And before too long, the storm came in and really hit us hard. I realized pretty quickly that whatever had made a hole in my sleeping pad must have also punctured my tent, because I started taking a little water in. I’ll need to investigate that at some point soon, because I think we’re supposed to get more rain tomorrow night.

Anyway, the storm came in before I had a chance to prepare anything for dinner, so I brought my food bag into my tent with me and now I’m just kind of grazing a bit. Not the greatest dinner, but I'll make up for it tomorrow.