Don’t Trust the Cuteness

My evening ended kind of abruptly last night, so I wasn’t able to get my recording done before I went to bed. So I’m going to recap the 31st now. I woke up in the morning in the yard at Tom Levardi's house in Dalton, Massachusetts. When I went to bed, I left the flaps to the fly on my tent open, just to get some nice airflow, since it was a pretty warm evening. But sometime in the middle of the night, or maybe early morning, the rains came, so that turned into sort of a rude awakening. The inside of my tent got a bit wet before I could close up the fly.

And I didn’t realize this at first, but Tom’s house is adjacent to some railroad tracks — not directly adjacent, but definitely within easy hearing distance. So a couple trains went by over the course of the night. I didn’t exactly get the best night's sleep, but that's okay.

Tom put out a little breakfast for all of us hikers on his picnic table in the yard. There was cereal and a little coffee cake. He also provides water for everybody, which is really helpful. He's just a super nice guy.

While we were sitting down to have a little food, he came and sat down and started chatting. He told us stories about some of his crazy guests over the years. He had one guy who showed up and stayed with him for months. The guy ran out of money, so he got a job at some fast food restaurant that wasn't very far away. And he just lived in Tom’s yard and rode his bike to work, and Tom kept hosting him.

There's also a cat that sort of lives in Tom's yard. It's actually the neighbor's cat, but it seems to like Tom better. Tom doesn't even know its name. It's very cute, but it has a tendency to bite, so Tom has signs up warning people to be ready for that if they try to pet the cat.

By about 7:30, I was all packed up and ready to go. The next notable location further down the trail was the town of Cheshire, Massachusetts. And there are two ways to get from Dalton to Cheshire. The first is to just walk through Dalton. The AT runs for probably a mile or a mile and a half through the town, mostly on residential streets. The other way is to take the rail trail, which is a nice, flat, paved pathway, but it adds on a couple of extra miles of road walking. It's close to 11 miles to get to Cheshire if you take the rail trail and about 8.5 if you take the AT. So that’s the trade-off.

I talked to Tom about it, and he recommended that I avoid the extra miles and just stick to the AT. I’ve also noticed lately that my hip seems to do better when I'm doing long distances on a trail rather than on hard surfaces. So I ultimately opted for the AT, but some of the other hikers who were staying at Tom’s chose the rail trail instead.

The rail trail and the AT meet in the town of Cheshire, right at a little blue house that serves ice cream. When I got there, a bunch of hikers were already there, including Quadzilla, 60, Pyro, and Matcha, and Dare showed up pretty shortly afterward. I got a large mocha milkshake, which was fantastic. I've always liked milkshakes anyway, but I think I’ve decided that milkshakes are officially my favorite food-slash-drink on the trail. They're just packed with sugar, calories, and fat, and I mean, they just taste great. And I hope to be drinking more of them in the future.

So, not only did it rain last night, but the forecast was also calling for intermittent showers throughout the day. The whole time we were hiking from Dalton to Cheshire, it was raining, and all of us were just soaked. While we were hanging out at the ice cream place, it had stopped for a bit, but everything around us was wet, so it kind of didn’t matter.

After we finished up, those guys sped ahead, because they were planning on doing 25 miles and needed to make up some time. I was definitely not doing 25 miles, so I just kind of wandered through the town of Cheshire. It was mostly along residential streets, but then there was about a five-minute walk along a highway — not a big one, though. But there was a Shell station with a Dunkin Donuts in it.

I obviously had to stop at the Dunkin Donuts. S. and I have this thing where we like to try the vanilla cream donuts at pretty much any Dunkin Donuts we see. We’ve had some awful ones and some pretty great ones. The best ones by far have been in Massachusetts, and the very best one was in Chelsea, just north of Logan Airport. That's been sort of the high water mark for vanilla cream donuts for years. We've been chasing that dragon for a long time.

This Dunkin only had chocolate-covered vanilla cream donuts, not the usual powdered sugar, but that was probably better for me, because I could use the calories. So I ordered one, as well as a coffee, and I got a medium regular. In New England, this means a medium-sized coffee with cream and sugar.

When I was growing up in New Jersey, “regular” meant “medium.” So when I first moved to Boston, I’d hear people order a “medium regular” and think, You're asking for a medium medium? But in Massachusetts, at least, if you say “regular,” you’re getting cream and a lot of sugar. You know, normally, if you're eating a donut, that's probably enough sugar and calories that you should be drinking black coffee, but the game’s a little different when you're hiking the AT.

As soon as I got back on the trail, it started raining again. And when you leave Cheshire, you’ve got a very long ascent to the peak of Mount Greylock — it's something like 7.7 miles. Originally, I hadn’t planned on going all the way to the peak, but I really wanted to get out of the rain, and I felt pretty good after the large milkshake, vanilla cream donut, and coffee with cream and sugar. That was some pretty good hiker fuel. So about midway up, I decided that I was going to try to push on to the summit for the night.

But I didn't have enough cell service to be able to call ahead to Bascom Lodge, which is the lodge at the peak of Greylock. I knew they had a bunkhouse specifically for hikers, though. It costs $45 and has only minimal amenities, but at that point, I didn’t care. I was just soaking wet and tired and really wanted a shower. Thankfully, S. managed to get in touch with someone at the front desk for me and booked me a space.

So I was powering my way up the side of Greylock, and about a half mile from the peak, all the calories from the food I’d eaten in Cheshire just seemed to peter out. I’d been hiking along pretty quickly, but then I hit a wall. Apparently, I experienced some time dilation, too. Usually when I’m hiking, I’ll cover a few miles before checking how far I've gone. But that afternoon, I was checking practically every tenth of a mile. It felt like I was out there forever but not getting any closer to the peak.

Eventually, I made it. I walked into the lobby, and there was a guy working there, setting up for a talk. This place was built by the Civilian Conservation Corps back in the ’30s, during the Depression, so it's not very big, and the lobby — if you can really even call it that — is just tiny. There are a couple of chairs in it and a little reception desk, and then there's a room off to the side with a couple of tables, and this guy was working on setting up a projector in there.

So I walked in, just dripping wet, and he looked at me and was like, “Do you have a reservation?” I said yes, and he said, “Well, I can't help you right now.” He then told me to sit down and wait, and I commented that he probably didn’t want me sitting on the furniture soaking wet and dirty like I was. So he pointed me to a bench instead.

I waited for a bit, and eventually, he came back and showed me to the bunkroom. Some southbound section hikers from Canada were already in there and had a dog with them. This guy kicks the dog’s water bowl and is like, “What is THIS doing here?” I asked him if I could get towel for the shower, and he said he didn’t have time to get me one because he had to go help with the presentation.

I was like, “It takes you three seconds to give me a towel.” All he had to do was open a cupboard, grab one, and hand it to me. So he begrudgingly gave me one before storming off. The other hikers and I all agreed that he was probably the grumpiest hotel worker we'd ever come across. But at least I was able to take a shower, which felt awesome.

There’s a cafe in the lodge, but it's mainly for the guests that are staying in the expensive rooms — not grubby hikers who are staying in the bunk room — but you can technically eat there if you want. You just have to pre-order it. You can't just walk in and eat dinner. So most of the hikers who stay there use that side room I mentioned earlier to make their dinner, but we didn't have access to that because of the presentation. Another option was to cook outside, but it was pouring down rain still, so that was off the table, too.

I was really tired and didn't want to go through the effort of figuring out what to do about dinner, so I just ate a little beef jerky. The hotel sells beer and wine right by the reception desk, so the other hikers and I hung out in the lobby with their dog Alba, just talking for a few hours. And I proceeded to drink three 12% Imperial IPAs on a basically empty stomach after hiking probably 18 miles. So that hit me pretty hard.

I was supposed to have a phone call with S., but I wasn’t in any shape to do that, so we postponed. Instead, I just kind of stumbled upstairs, fell on my bed, and passed out.