Our Lives: Hard Times on the AT

Mmmm...where should I start? We are now in Massachusetts at mile 1,510.7. We only have 667.6 miles left. Since leaving New York City we have seen a massive amount of rain. Pretty much every day it has rained on us. It is starting to wear on us a lot...thank goodness we are over 2/3 done. This has been an especially rough week. I have had a toothache for about 3 weeks now, and Nick has been feeling very tired and achy. We just arrived in Great Barrington today and I have already confirmed I need a root canal, and Nick is currently at a clinic waiting to see if he has Lyme disease. The good news is I might get a root canal for free. Apparently in Massachusetts it is the law everyone has to have health insurance or you will be fined, so somehow they have some awesome clinics that offer free services for people that do not have insurance like me. Today they already did some drilling and temporary work for free, but I have not heard if they can fit me in tomorrow to do the root canal. Nick had to take a bus to a bigger town with a walk-in clinic, but hopefully it will not be too expensive. It seems everyone has had Lyme disease that lives up here. He will just have to take a dose of antibotics, and he will be good to go. Wish us luck! Hopefully it stops raining so our morale is boosted!! Oh I almost forgot. We saw 2 more bears. This time when we saw them one ran away quickly, but the other one didn't seem too scared. We both thought about grabbing the camera, but something told us maybe this bear should not be messed with so we yelled and clapped our hands. He ran a little ways down the trail where we needed to go, so we followed and saw him again. We yelled some more, and he just ran out of sight and stopped. We never saw him again, but he sure wasn't that scared of us.
Q&A:
1. I have not tried to eat stinging nettle. The way it made my legs feel I would have not guessed you could put it in your mouth. If I get brave enough I might have to try that.
2. Did we get to do any sightseeing in NYC? Nope. We were trying to save our money, so we didn't do anything but eat out a couple of times and buy myself a new pack.

The Lemon Squeezer. We heard about this part of the trail about 100 miles ago, but we didn't find it to be too bad. The trail likes to lead us through the most pointless things. It is really like an obstacle course.

In Bear Mountain, NY we got to walk through a zoo that was actually part of the trail. This is a horrible picture, but there is a bobcat in that house. We were also at the lowest point of the whole trail in the zoo...124ft.

Crossing the Hudson River.

This snake just ate a good meal. Look how fat her belly is!

The flag on top of a mountain. It says, "In memory of Sept. 11, 2001."

Finally we found the biggest oak tree on the AT. It is 20'4" around and estimate to be over 300 years old.

We made it to Connecticut!!

Nick is such a gentleman. Here he is placing some rocks across this rushing stream to help me cross so I won't get my boots wet. Due to all the rain the streams have been pretty tricky to cross. Only one time did I have to suck it up and just get my boots soaked.

Can't believe the road company actually made signs for this detour. Nick was a little upset about the detour since it stopped him from getting to do the exact trail. They are putting in a new bridge though, so what can we do.

They even made detour blazes. How cute.

This was placed here in Lime Rock in memory of the first settlers...or something like that. Kind of different.

Lime Rock also had a racing park. This is not a very good picture, but they had the course kind of blocked off. We heard the roaring of racing cars vibrating through the valley for hours while walking over the mountains.

This is the Housatonic River. Now I have already mentioned this a couple of times, but it has been raining a lot here!!! You can see how flooded the river is, and how scary those falls look. When we were here a boy went swimming above these falls...not smart. When we were walking through there were helicopters, rescue boats, kayakers, news crews, and a ton of people all around the river looking for him. Our thoughts are with his family, but I do not think this could turn out well.