To Katahdin: 972.2
Rather than continue writing out “Landon and Miranda and I” I am going to start using THF to represent our little group. It stands for Team Hustle and Flow, which is a kind of group trail name they’ve been using for most of the trail, and which I now seem to be a part of. So with that, THF started the day intending to make it over to the neighboring town of Pottsville, PA home to America’s oldest beer brewery, the Yeungling Brewery. They have free tours, and apparently it’s Mirandas favorite beer and she has been looking forward to this place the whole trail. We started with a large helping of Microtel continental breakfast, then utilized a free shuttle at Cabela’s to get back to Port Clinton. They couldn’t go farther than that though so we hitchhiked from there into Pottsville. It was the busiest road I’ve tried to get a ride on and it took the longest but we got one and made it to the brewery about 15 minutes before the tour.
The tour was short but fairly interesting. We got to see the caves where they fermented the beer before modern technology and the wall that the US government built to barricade the caves during prohibition. We saw the canning factory line and the distribution ports and got some decent pictures of it all. After that we were starving and on our way to a pizza/italian place while discussing how we would get a ride back to the trail when we stumbled upon one of the nicest people we’ve met and the best trail magic so far although we didn’t know it at the time.
It was actually right outside the restaurant, this guy sees us with our packs, asks if were hiking the trail – yep – asks how we’re getting back – dont know – and offers us a ride. We sound interested but we are starving and want to eat! He gives Landon his phone number and says he’ll be up the street a ways at his place, call him when we’re done. We order food – way too much, even for thru-hikers – I got a “small” stromboli just for me, but it turned out to be basically a 16 inch pizza with 3/4 inches of meat stacked on it folded in half. Massive. Delicious.
Finally we called this guy Jon and he said to meet him six blocks up the hill, he’d be outside reading the paper, waiting for his sister to finish using their vehicle. We got there and he said it might be a little bit of a wait, but that we were welcome to spend the night in what is a kind of upstairs apartment. The building is several stories high but used to be all one house, now this guy and his two sisters have it kind of separated into three apartments. We had only been planning on five miles out of town, and after a bit of deliberation we decided that we could still be into the next town on schedule and this offer was too good to pass up. It was basically “make yourself at home” – showers, laundry, sleep on the sofas, watch a movie, have whatever’s in the fridge, all free for all three of us. Oh and he would still drive us back to the trail in the morning. Quite a treat, and worthy of many thanks. We ended up spending most of the evening watching the movie 9/11 and enjoying the house. A surprise zero day, but a pretty cool one, and five miles is pretty much zero anyway.