Fancy Ramen with a Friend
I’m going to start this entry from when I got up in the morning, for a change. I spent the night last night at the Eagles Nest shelter and campsite. Today is July 3, by the way. And today was a very special day, because the plan was to meet up with my friend Scott, who was driving up from the DC area. Fortunately, the Eagles Nest campsite was only about 9 miles from the town of Port Clinton and Hamburg. Scott was going to be arriving pretty early in the day, so I got an early start and was on the trail just before 6:30. It was pretty cool last night, which was greatly appreciated. I know that the cool weather will be coming to an abrupt end soon, though, and that’s unfortunate, because hiking in the milder weather over the past few days has been really nice. It's been great to not be sweating constantly.
I made it down to the road by about 11 o'clock, and it turned out that I had given Scott the wrong location to pick me up. I had to put a pin in a Google map so he could find me. Thankfully, that worked.
Once he’d picked me up, we headed over to Cabela's, which is this offensively large outdoor store that doesn’t necessarily cater to backpackers — it's more of a hunting, fishing, car camping type of place — but I needed to get a few things. First, though, Scott had kindly brought a cooler with some ice cold Bingo lagers, and I was still toasty from my hike, so we took a few minutes to drink a beer in the parking lot before we went into the store. Sorry if that offends anyone.
I bought myself a sun hoodie at Cabela's, which I hope will help keep me from getting too much more sun, since wearing sunscreen is pretty pointless for me. My concern is that it might be too hot, but this one seems pretty light, so I’m going to give it a try. I guess we’ll see.
After Cabela’s, we got lunch at Red Robin and then headed down to Reading, Pennsylvania, where Scott had gotten us a room at the Marriott Courtyard. Along the way, we made sure to stop by the railroad to collect our $200.
After we checked in, I did some laundry while Scott did a little work. He’d picked this hotel specifically based on its proximity to a taproom, which in my opinion is a genius way to select a hotel. We walked over to the Sly Fox Brewery Company’s taproom and had a few beers while we caught up a bit. For dinner, we went to a Japanese place that was pretty close by, and I ordered the Black Garlic Tonkatsu Ramen, of all things. I mean, I realize that the thru-hiker's diet is fairly ramen heavy, so that might seem like an odd thing to order when you’re at an actual restaurant in town, but this was real ramen — not, you know, the stuff you buy for 75 cents at the grocery store. And it was delicious.
We decided that the night was still reasonably young, so after we were done eating, we retraced our steps and went back to the Sly Fox taproom for a bit. Back at the hotel, we watched The Empire Strikes Back and then Return of the Jedi, though we didn't quite make it all the way through that one. All in all, it was a pretty good day, and it was great to see Scott and have a chance to hang out. He’ll be dropping me back at the trail tomorrow, but we’ll have some time in the morning to have breakfast together first.
