July 29

The long road to Pawling

Got a 9am start this morning.  We passed the RPH shelter after about a mile.  Probably should have stayed here last night.  It was a really nice shelter, looking more like a hostel bunk house.  The hiking was really easy all morning.  After a little over 10 miles, we stopped for lunch at the Morgan Stewart shelter.  The rest of the afternoon, more easy terrain.  We made it to the road crossing at County Rd 20, which would take us to Pawling, NY 3.1 miles away.  At the road we took pictures of the Dover Oak.  This is the largest oak tree on the AT, with a circumference of over 20 feet.  Then we started walking down the highway toward town.  Nobody stopped to pick us up.  After about a mile, an SUV with Virginia tags pulled over and gave us a ride to the grocery store so we could resupply.  After a successful shopping trip, we sat outside the store sorting through our rations.  I saw there was a pizza place across the street, and since I hadn't had pizzaria pizza in New York yet, I decided to walk over and have that for dinner.  At 3 Guys Pizza, I started talking to the people working there about my trip.  All the usual questions.  Where'd you start.  How long have you been hiking.  How do you eat.  Where do you sleep.  When my order was ready, the guy behind the counter told me to go ahead and grab a couple Powerades out of the cooler, free of charge.  Also, he gave me my pepporoni pie, and said that he went ahead an upgraded me to the extra large size.  Awesome!  So I took my huge, cheesy, floppy slices, of NY pizza goodness back across the street to share with Tink and Slims.  The sun had set by the time we finished up.  We knew there was a park in town that we could camp at for free.  We were really happy about the 19 miles we had hiked today, the easy terrain, good resupply, awesome dinner, and the prospect of being able to camp in town.  What we didn't realize until later is that the store we had gotten a ride to was an additional 2 miles away from town.  And it was on a really busy divided highway.  So we got to walk down that, in the dark, back to town.  Then walk another mile to the park.  We weren't even sure where the park was, so Slims pulled up a Google map on his phone so we could get a better idea of where it was.  We ended up walking to the back side of the park, and set up in the dugout of a baseball field.  By this point, it was really late.  We were exhausted.  The dark clouds in the night sky threatened of rain all night long.