Breakfast is always the first order of the day. I am in no rush today but hey… priorities. Holiday inn Express used to push their cinnamon rolls as the gimmick to hook you in. But the sad truth is that they’re a bit dry and not really that good at all.

Laundry is the next chore as most of my clothes are pretty nasty. In between running to the guest laundry room I’m repackaging and packing my food. I can’t pack the pack yet because clothes go at the bottom.

I also have another exciting chore today. 2 miles into the hike I will walk right past a post office. There are several things in my pack that I just haven’t used on this trip and don’t plan to use for the rest of it.

One interesting choice of things to send back as my 360° camera. It takes awesome videos and being waterproof I can do things with it that I can’t do with my other cameras. But I’ve only used it twice on this trip and after losing my tent pole when I took my umbrella out I keep my tent pole in a different location now. It’s in a location where I can’t reach while I’m hiking so I haven’t used that camera except for the first few days. It weighs about 5 oz and that’s enough of a factor for me to decide to send it home. I also send home a mini tripod for the camera that I always hold in my hand.

Among the things that I decide not to send back is my little dog water bowl that I use as a washing machine. I never used it on the Florida Trail and I haven’t used it yet on this trip but I am expecting the second half to be far more remote and having to hand wash laundry a significant portion of the time. We shall see if that was a good decision or not.

I am able to get all my chores done and packed up and leave the hotel by 10:00 a.m. which is a pretty early start considering all the chores I still had to do this morning. The walk through town is nice. I passed several cafes that are serving breakfast/brunch and I’m tempted to stop but there’s no reason to.

When I mail my things back at the post office I asked them what the weight of the box is and it ends up being 14 and a half ounces. That’s nearly a pound I don’t have to carry anymore and my pack actually feels lighter. You really can feel 1 lb. Every time I pull my water bottle out to drink I can tell it’s not on my back anymore. And that is 2 lb full.

After the post office, the trail changes to bike pads. It is just a scenic as entering town. This would be a pretty cool place to live but I’m not sure I could handle the winters. The trails also intersect with cross country ski trails. This town was definitely geared towards people who love the outdoors.

For my lunch break, I am targeting what they call an indoor shelter. And when I get there I find out what they mean. It is like a visitor center but there’s no one there. Half of the building is just an open space with tables and chairs and a wood burning stove. The other half are flush bathrooms. Oh, the luxury of indoor plumbing.

The trail through this section of the park is mostly through meadows and up and over eskers and kames. A kame is just a singular mound of a hill, whereas the esker is like a ridgeline. They are both just piles of rubble left over from the melting glaciers.

They route us to one particular game that has a tower built on top of it. It’s not quite as tall as a fire tower but pretty close. The viewer top is far above the trees so you literally can see probably 50 miles in each direction. In fact I think I can see the skyline of Milwaukee. Either that or Madison. I’m not sure which direction Madison would be from here.

One of the areas I will reach today is called the Niagara escarpment. All of the glacial features so far have been related to rocks and sand deposited by the melting glaciers. But as the glaciers advance they push all this rock and soil off of the harder bedrock below. This area exposes the dolomite that the glaciers could not push away and this is the same bedrock that goes all the way to Niagara. It is also why there is a peninsula between Green Bay and Lake Michigan. There is an interesting artificial wall made of some of the flat stones that are exposed in this region. The dolomite is easy to spot because it has solution holes made into it where The Rock has unevenly dissolved over time. It’s similar to the formations in the Everglades on the Florida Trail that made man-eating holes you could accidentally step into.

There is not that much road walking in this section but there is some. The cool part about this road walking is they actually have cut a trail in people’s front yards about 20 yards from the road. That is good on this section because there are no shoulders on the roads and many blind hills to make road walking unideal.

I end up reaching the distributed camp area by about 5:00 p.m. This was my original stopping point for the evening. But the weather forecast shows very heavy all day rains on Thursday. This would be the day that I am hiking into the next town from the last distributed camp area on a 21 Mile road walk.

There are still three hours of daylight left. There is also another area where I can camp about 8 Miles away. After looking at the maps I figure a schedule where I can actually take a day out of this section and take a zero day in Janesville while it is raining.

If I can shave a full day out of this section, a zero day would not impact my schedule at all. It means doing 28 miles today even after starting late at 10:00 a.m., then doing either 28 miles each for the next 2 days, or doing a 35 and then a 21 for the next 2 days. The first scenario is definitely doable. The decision is made let’s go to the next camp area tonight and push hard for the next 2 days. I will try and get up and start hiking before 6:00 a.m. tomorrow to make the 35-mile day a possibility.

The best time for me to hike are those early morning hours from about 30 minutes before sunrise to 2 hours after sunrise. The second best time is just the opposite. The last two or three hours before sunset. Hiking in cooler temperatures without the sun beating down on you is always more pleasant.

About 1 mi from the place I was planning on camping I find a nice wide open space where I can pitch my tent far from the trail. This is probably a better location than where I was intending anyway. Let’s go ahead and camp here. There is some breeze so the mosquitoes are not bad at all.

Emotion of the day, Robotic

Robotic isn’t really the right term it’s more like overly analytical. The morning was getting all the chores done so quickly that a drill instructor would be impressed.

Looking at the weather, looking at the maps, figuring out where to camp, figuring out what the schedule would look like. These are all the logistical things that go on during a through hike that people who don’t through hike don’t really get to see. It’s not just a walk in the woods with a bag full of goodies.

There is a lot of planning involved, both before and during a hike. A schedule is just a schedule. The terrain the weather unforeseen circumstances all make the schedule just a suggestion. It is boots on the ground that make it happen.

Walking through the city, walking on bike paths, walking on path to people’s front yards instead of on roads for the most part, all this takes away decision making. The miles passed by quickly.

So today it was all about logistics, and feeling a bit like a robot. If I could figure out how to walk while sleeping I probably could have slept half the day while hiking today. But then I would have missed half the scenery.