I wanted to make sure I started my routine before 5:00 so I could get up and moving and leave the snowmobile path as early as possible after sunrise. I was camped near a bridge and I could hear two bicycles pass by, one of them even before 5:00. I wonder if either of them saw me.

Since I am camping in grass, the tent is soaking wet. I have everything backed in the pack before I get out of it so that only the pack has to sit in the wet grass while I roll up the tent. There is no point in trying to keep things clean or dry I just have to roll up the soggy mess and put it in its stuff sack. It has a waterproof sack so it won’t get the rest of the things in the pack wet.

The ankle is stiff this morning and it takes at least 10 minutes for it to warm up. It helps to start out slow and just let the pace naturally improve. There is a tender spot on one of my toes that I will have to keep an eye on but it is not causing me any issues while hiking.

I was a little further from the road walk then I thought last night. I am 2 miles away from where the trail is closed and I have to take a detour of two miles around about one and a half miles of trail. The trail is closed because of an unsafe tunnel.

Comments in the guide suggest that the reroute is pleasant. And when I get to it I find that the comments are true. You can see several large farms and the rolling hillside of this area. The road turns four or five times and every time it does the scenery completely changes.

One of the last farms that I walk next to has a vast collection of older implements for their tractors. They have two of the oldest combines I have ever seen. You can tell that this thing was probably tricky to operate in its days there are little wheels and knobs to adjust nearly every aspect of its operation. Modern ones are far more automated.

The detour route finally makes its way back to the rail trail. But after only a mile or two it is time for road walking. They have us detour about 2 mi on a road to reach a section of about 6 mi of dedicated trail. Then it looks like about a mile of road walking to get back to the same rail trail I am on now. These 9 miles of Trail look like they replace four or five rail trail miles and bypass an entire town. I hope these 9 miles of trailer worth it.

One benefit to this longer section of Trail is that it passes by a county park with a hand pump and electric outlets. I am in need of water and can always charge my devices. I spend about 30 minutes there letting my battery charger do its thing. It is a pretty nice park.

There is still a little bit of road walking left to get to the trail section and it goes by quickly. When I get to the trail section it starts as a grassy hike through a meadow. It is late enough in the day that the grass is not really getting my feet wet. But The Meadows are all starting to look alike now.

I can tell from the map that there is going to be some elevation changes here. It looks like we will be hiking up and over eskers again. It also looks like it is hardwood forest so I am expecting mosquitoes.

The mosquitoes do come but so do the apple trees. I managed to find a really good size apple that has no worms in it and it is one of the sweeter ones that I have found on this trip. There are so many different kinds of berries on the trees around here but I have no idea what any of them are.

To my surprise, more of the trail is in Meadows than hardwoods as I was expecting around the hills. The elevation is not as steep as the map suggested either. It ends up being a really nice 6 Mile section of trails. I can see why the long detour to get here now. And I also end up seeing about a dozen day hikers on this Sunday morning.

By the time I make it back to the rail trail, it is 2:00. There is a bench at the intersection and I pause to think about making coffee but it is a little too early. I will just hike on to the next bench and make it at 2:30 or 3:00.

The problem with this plan is that no more benches appear on the entire length of this rail trail. There have been more benches on this trail than any trail I have ever seen but not on this particular rail trail. It is after 3:30 before I find the bench at the road intersection and can make my coffee. It is at least three miles of road walking to get to the trails leading into town and I need to make sure I have enough energy.

After my 30 minute coffee break, I am off. The road has no shoulder and has several hills but has very little traffic so it is not that big of a deal. But the last mile is on a very high speed road with a ton of traffic. I am basically walking in the ditch for the entire mile.

The trail section finally comes and it is more meadow walking. The weeds in this meadow are gigantic. They’re over 6 ft tall. I should have known because the name of the park is Moraine Meadow.

I am hot and worn out and decide to try and get a room as close to Verona as possible. All of the rooms in this town have been booked up for weeks but there are adjacent towns that have had vacancies. I end up getting a Fairfield Inn about 14 miles from where I will end up. I will have to Uber to the hotel.

As the trail approaches town, it goes through neighborhoods, transitions to bike paths, and sometimes sidewalks. It seems to change every quarter mile or so. And through these changes I miss one of my turns. I stay on the sidewalk where the trail turned off onto a wooded trail. Instead of backtracking I just bushwack across the field to catch the trail.

There is also a section of closed trail that I will have to detour around. The detour is blazed with yellow markers, but there is no alternate track in the app. This is a several year detour so it would be nice if they could put the detour as an alternate in the app. If I get lost on The detour it will be serious cross-country travel through swampy areas to get back to where I need to be.

I managed to not get lost on the detour but it was a bit longer than the regular trail. I can see the grocery store that is my ending point but the trail goes way past it and then snakes back. I stick to the official Trail so that I can make it easier to resume tomorrow morning.

Once I hit the grocery store I make a mental list of things I will need for the next 4 days. It is very dangerous to go grocery shopping while hungry. I managed to keep things under control and under purchase what I will need. I will take inventory tonight and then come back in the morning if I need to buy more. But what I discover in my research is that the very next town has another grocery store, so I probably didn’t need to buy anything at all. I have not been very successful in buying groceries on this trip.

I hail a Lyft ride, and the trip will only cost $16 and a driver accepts my request in under a minute. This is at least a good sign. I change into a clean shirt and wash up just a little bit so that I don’t smell horrendous in the driver’s car. I barely get everything packed up again before the driver shows up.

At the hotel it’s the normal things. Shower, get coins for laundry, go find food. On the way into the hotel I saw that there was a Five Guys on the next block, so I head there. As I am sitting eating the free peanuts while waiting for my burger, I noticed there is a Dickey’s Barbecue right across the street. I wish I had seen that earlier. I just cannot win at the food game.

Emotion of the Day, Anticipation

Today was a long string of unknowns. Would my secret camping spot be discovered? Would the tunnel detour be pleasant or a pain? Would the road walks be pleasant or dangerous? Would the mosquitoes eat me alive? Would the sun come out and bake me? Would trying to get an Uber to a town 15 minutes away be a disaster?

It turns out that only two roads were too dangerous to walk on in my opinion. The mosquitoes were not as bad as other similar sections of trail. And the sun stayed hidden by clouds for much of the day.

The most unpleasant part of the day was trying to find a bench to make coffee on. That section of rail trail had thick vegetation on each side and not an inviting place to just park on the ground. It also had a ton of bicycles.

Everything worked out in the end as it always does.