The Gondola and the Gauntlet
All right, I woke up on Friday, August 9, at the Comfort Inn. And I was very happy to be in a hotel, because it was pouring rain again. Vermont's just been very rainy. I got off the trail mostly to avoid being outside during the remnants of Hurricane Debbie or tropical storm Debbie or whatever, but Debbie hadn’t even arrived yet in Rutland — this was another fairly substantial rainstorm that came through overnight, so again, I was definitely glad to be off trail.
Zero days in hotel rooms when you're hiking the Appalachian Trail are glorious. I slept in a little bit. I went and ate breakfast in the hotel lobby. I did my laundry and tackled a bunch of items on my to-do list — you know, organizing gear and mapping out mileage for the next couple of sections and updating my iPod.
People have laughed at me for having an iPod. I’m not really sure how to migrate everything over to something else, and I don't want my music on my phone. So I'm pretty angry at Apple for discontinuing the iPod. I’m going to keep using mine until it dies. People can go ahead and laugh at me.
Anyway, I need to update my playlist every once in a while, because I get tired of hitting “shuffle” and hearing the same songs over and over and over again. [Wife note: Add “Low” by Flo Rida next time!] So I spent some time putting together a new playlist and downloading some more podcasts and all that fun stuff. I also took the opportunity to try to dry my tent out in the bathroom. I draped it over the shower rod and kept rotating it around so different parts could get a chance to dry out. When it was mostly dry, I moved it out into the main room. I'm sure the hotel management would be less than pleased to know I’d done that. I think hotels where hikers tend to stay specifically ask you not to do things like that, but I was very careful to not leave any dirt behind, so I don't think they'll be any the wiser.
By the time I had finished all my chores, it was probably early afternoon. The weather still wasn't great, and the closest option for food was McDonald's. S. and I really don’t eat fast food, aside from the occasional run to Taco Bell. I probably haven't eaten a meal at McDonald's for minimum 15 years. But I decided to pop over there and grab a couple things, all of which were highly caloric, including a large milkshake — which was fantastic — and then retreated to the hotel just as the rains from Debbie were moving in.
[Wife note: Rob/Patch straight up refused to take a pic of his MickeyD's haul, so I improvised. I also had to edit out the salad. 😄]
My friend Doug lives in Chicago, and he had rented a car to drive up and spend a couple nights with me here in Rutland. On the way, he was going to drop his daughter off at her aunt and uncle's house for a visit. Unfortunately, Debbie was affecting things all up and down the East Coast, which delayed him a bit, but selfishly, that was kind of okay with me. It gave me plenty of time to just sit on my bed, watch the Olympics, have a beer, and enjoy being really lazy. Doug got to the hotel a little after 8 o'clock, and we ordered a pizza for the room, caught up a little, and called it a night.
When we woke up this morning, the weather was beautiful. Today was probably the first day I’ve had since getting into Vermont that it didn’t rain. Doug had wanted to do a little hiking with me on the AT, and I’d sort of expected the weather to prevent us from doing that, but we got lucky. I had looked into our options for doing a day hike, if we got the chance, and I’d discovered that Killington, which is just north of Rutland, operates its gondola during the summer so people can ride up to the top of the mountain and enjoy the view or whatever. And the Appalachian Trail actually passes just under the summit of Killington.
So, we took Doug’s rental car to the trailhead where I’d gotten picked up the day before yesterday, and I arranged with Neighbor — the local shuttle driver — to take us from there over to the Killington gondola. Then, we rode the gondola up to the peak of Killington, and our plan was to hike the 11 miles or so down, back to Doug’s car.
To start, we had to hike up over the peak and down the other side a little bit to meet up with the Appalachian Trail. From there, it was a pretty long decent and pretty rocky, too.
I can imagine that for someone who hasn’t spent any real time on the trail, this section might have been a bit of a rude awakening, and I think that was the case for Doug. But he handled it like a champ, and we steadily made our way down Killington and back to the trailhead.
[Wife note: Whooooooo is this handsome friend? Sorry, I'll see myself out...]
That took us the better part of a day. By the time we got to the car, Doug was all too happy to get to sit down and not worry about hiking on the AT again any time in the near future. Or maybe ever.
On the way back to the hotel, we stopped at the supermarket, because I needed to do a brief resupply before I head out again tomorrow. We also picked up some food we could have in the room for dinner, so we didn’t have to go out again. Now that we’ve both showered up, we’re just going to eat, chill out, and watch some Olympics.
